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THE EQUALITY OF THE STATES. 
Meeting of the Breckinridge and Lane Association of Philadelphia, 
Nor., 1800. 
Mr. Chairman and Fellow-Citizens: — Next Tuesday, which is 
five days oft', we shall cast our votes on a question thought to he the 
most momentous we have voted on since the formation of the Federal 
Constitution, and yet it is only whether one or another man shall sit 
in the Chair of State a mere speck of time — four years — under written 
limitation for good or ill, with the Judiciary and Congress over his 
head, and the Constitution ahove them all. If Mr. Lincoln comes in, it 
will probahly be with a majority against him in both houses of Con- 
gress, certainly in the Senate, and with no sort of chance, his first 
Congress being over, of ever getting out of a minority. If Mr. Breckin- 
ridge comes in, we have the man of our choice ; a man lately elevated 
to the second place in the nation when scarce constitutionally of age; 
one of those rare instances of a citizen who, nut striving at public iavor, 
without resorting to a single unworthy ait, or ever seeking popularity 
by stooping, has captivated the affections of his countrymen. At 
Rome, you remember, to he fortunate was a virtue; that grand people 
understood human nature as well as war and policy ; and I do not 
believe that we, though much smaller people, are mistaken in this citiy" 
20 / 



r 



5'S 

X 



306 CHAELES ESTGERSOLL. 



zcn, who just receives and accepts what others toil after. He is a true 
man, fellow-citizens; he will never disappoint you. What, then, is the 
matter with us? Why all this anxious inquiry, these threats and mut- 
terings, that come to us from so many quarters, and make a sort of 
atmosphere in which we draw with difficulty our political breath ? There 
arc seasons, fellow-citizens, in which it is well to look at something else 
than party lines ; to examine the rules and principles that should regu- 
late them ; to inquire not only whether we shall succeed, but whether we 
have earned and are deserving of success ; and I propose to occupy the 
hour you have assigned me in an endeavor to show, returning a little 
to principle and the past, arguing from yesterday as well as to-day, that 
the great Democratic party, so long in the ascendent, unless it comes 
to and takes a reckoning, or, to bring the metaphor from sky and sea 
to dry land, unless it stop and inquire its way, is like to lose itself. 
The problem to be solved is the old one of North and South* They 
tell us, in toasts and speeches, there is no North, no South, but that is 
not so ; there is a South and there is a North, and for a long time they 
have not harmonized. Gentlemen, you and I are Northern people ; I 
am a Northern man, I live in the North, my feelings, interests, preju- 
dices, are all Northern, and I will add that I never crossed from below 
the Potomac, and came upon the fields and humming cities of the 
North without congratulating myself that my lot was not cast in the 
planting country, cultivated by slave labor, with a meagre population, 
a lower civilization, and infinitely less capability for that magnificent 
future which it seems to be the birthright of every citizen of the United 
States to swell himself up and insist upon. Gentlemen, many a good 
citizen of the North says : I love my Southern brethren as well as 
you do, but I cannot agree to the extension of slavery. That is the 
word, the extension of slavery. Now, there I disagree with him, and 
the question to which I mean to call your attention is, whether he can 
be light, whether in a confederated, not a consolidated government, a 
government existing only at the good-will of the parties to it, not by 
force, a union of sovereign States, you can without any Constitutional 
provision for or against it restrict slavery to the States where it was 
found when the Constitution was formed ?• That is the question; and 
there I maintain the Democratic North must yield every inch of the 
ground, or we can never get ourselves where we ought to be. Can the 
North and South acquire territory by joint treaty, joint purchase, or 
war jointly waged by all the States, and then exclude from such 
common acquisition the whole capital and labor of the South? For 
all the capital and all the labor of almost all the South are slaves. 
Can we say to them, your capital and labor are noxious, your institu- 



I> 



«^. THE EQUALITY OF THE STATES. 



307 



tions are too bad to be propagated, they ought to die out; we agreed, 
in 1789, to tolerate them within your own borders, but we agreed to 
no more than that; we never agreed that when the thirteen States 
became thirty-two the nineteen new ones should be poisoned. Now, I 
grant that if the people of Blair county, within the consolidated sove- 
reignty of Pennsylvania, or a French department, or an English shire, 
desired to hold slaves ; or if they desired to introduce the institution/ &» 
of slavery into a colony conquered or planted by France or England, 
or, were it constitutionally possible, by Pennsylvania, the government 
at Paris, London, or Harrisburg, might well laugh at them.. But 
how is it when you come to apply the rule not among counties, but 
amoncr sovereign States, each equal to the other, each independent of 
the other, each having yielded to the common fund for common bene- 
fit, a scrupulously weighed and carefully described portion of their 
several rights, and no more or less ; and this right of going with their 
property into newly-acquired territory, is neither granted nor forbidden ? 
Can you exclude 'from j*fili territory the citizens of a State without i>< 
impairing its sovereignty? If, instead of holding negroes, the South- 
ern merTwere themselves negroes, what of that, if we have come into 
an equal union with them 8 Nobody pretends to find in the Constitu- 
tion that the framers of it have provided in any maimer whatever for 
this case of purchases of territory from France and Spain, and con- 
quests from Mexico. Our ancestors did not, know these things were to 
happen. What is the consequence? Why does not the fact of sove- 
reignty solve the problem ? Can it be that sovereign and equal States 
have not sovereign and equal rights ? I speak, observe me, of sove- 
reigntv and equality in no extreme sense— not as a stickler for it— not 
as what is called a State's rights man ; but as any man must admit it to 
be, who admits it at all. The States are equal before the Constitution, 
as you and I, Mr. Chairman, are equal before the law. You may be a 
better man than I am, my superior in mind, body, and estate ; you are, 
perhaps, more virtuous, more rich, more pleasing and powerful than I 
am. But suppose you were to tell me so, what would I say to that? 
what sort of position would yours be if, on a question of property or 
right between us, you should say to the tribunal before which we stood 
as%quals : " Look' at that man ; he is not my equal ; he is not as good 
as I ; he is a sinner ; let him go and repent ; he is pestilential ; let him 
o- and wash himself?" Sir, institutions are to a country as character 
'and qualities are to a man. To stigmatize them is to stigmatize the 

country ; to refuse to treat with a country, or deny its equality with -- 

you because they are a republic, and not a monarchy, or because they 
are a monarchy and not a republic, because they admit or - dude from 



! 



308 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

their borders this or that thing, is as insulting and intolerable as it, 
would be to you or me to set us aside us lacking character, honor, or 
reliability. Sir, it is a simple truth which passes all saws, that no man 
in a free country must say to another, " 1 am better than you." And 
how must it be with the States ? Can any man show me how we ever 
can settle with the South, as long as we say to them, you are not our 
equals? I say nothing of the injustice, the rank absurdity, of turning 
them off their own property, possessions acquired by their policy, their 
treasure, their blood ; of the disaster and ruin entailed on them by ex- 
cluding an agricultural people from the new lands, and cooping them 
up to plough the poor and exhausted. 

I say nothing of the fears of those who believe that, by letting the 
South in with their slaves, you keep off white labor, as if labor did not 
find its level just as water, air, trade, or any thing else does ; as if there 
was any danger of a planter taking his slaves to the North, or of 
white labor wanting to go to the rice-swamps or cotton-fields. I con- 
fine myself to the insult, to the abstraction, if you choose to call it so, 
of sovereignty; to the empty honor, if honor be empty; and to the 
question whether you ever met with a man fool enough to say to his 
equal, " I am your superior." Would you have our fellow-citizens 
submit to that ? Would you desire to associate with them if 
they did submit to it ? Would you have such a friend ? Would 
you form a union with such a State? Fellow-citizens, I say to you, if 
there was a clause in the Constitution which, by the most express 
words, and in the clearest language authorized us to dam up slavery in 
the old States, and exclude it from these Territories, it would have to 
be altered ; no writing could tie the States together on such terms. 
The Constitution has been altered more than once, and it would 
have to be altered again if it contained any such provision. 
Written constitutions are very good things, but every thing is 
not possible to them, and it is one of those political facts which we 
must make the best of, that governments are not to be struck off at a 
heat, even by the wisest heads. Governments are alluvion ; time, more 
than pen and ink, goes to the making of them ; and when we find, as 
in this case of the Territories, that nothing has been written to guide 
us, we must direct ourselves with measure and moderation. When 
things not provided for turn up, what we have to do is to give and take, 
to "use all gently," and get along as well as we can. Even where we 
have the text of the Constitution laying down the rule, we must expect 
to see it modified as ages pass over it. Nobody is as wise as posterity. 
See how the working of our machinery has already affected our insti- 
tutions. Do not you suppose those who made the Constitution would 









THE EQUALITY OF THE STATES. 309 

be a little surprised, could they come back aud look at the political 
machine, which they set going in 1789? Here is this Territorial ques- 
tion, involving the happiness of a country more extensive than the 
thirteen United States of that day, wholly unprovided for. There was 
the mode of electing the President, where the entire system of taking 
the election from the people and giving it to the electors, which 
was supposed to he a great political contrivance, has proved good 
for nothing, and as the thing works, the people make the President 
just as if there were no electors but themselves. The Senate was 
intended as a check on the appointing power, but rotation in office has 
given to the President uncontrolled po wer over a legion of officediolders ; 
and the rush for place gives form and pressure to our institutions, 
which was not dreamed of. So different was this at the start that 
Washington was at one period of his administration seriously embar- 
rassed for want of persons to come into his Cabinet; no Presi- 
dent now-a-days labors under such an embarrassment, I believe. Now 
everybody wants office, and all have become competent to it. T once 
heard a gentleman, now no more, say that when the first Constitution 
of Pennsylvania was framed, giving as it did very large powers to the 
Governor, it was taken for granted by every member of the Convention 
as a thing at that day supposed to admit of no doubt at all, that none but 
the most upright and best man in the State would ever be elected to the 
Chair of State. Yemen of Pennsylvania, when you go to see Mr. 
Andrew Curtin inaugurated, think of that! A Committee of the 
Senate was appointed at its first session to consider the title which the 
President ought to bear, and they reported in favor of styling him "His 
Highness, the President of the United States of America, .and Protector 
of their liberties." Imagine the meeting, gentlemen, between his High- 
ness, the President, and his Royal Highness, the little Prince of Wales ! 

I remind you of changes past, and tell you there are more to come, 
as a sort of hint to that national vanity, which seems to possess and 
persuade us that our institutions are perfect, and provide for all cases, 
and that on this territorial question, unless our Southern friends can 
turn to the text of the Constitution, and show that they are right, they 
must needs be all wrong. It is not so. Our institutions arc not perfect, 
they are imperfect. We must respect great truths, and we have as 
much need to fall back upon human justice and forbearance towards one 
another, here in the United States, as they have in any part of the world. 

But let me go on and show you, how this thing of slavery, which 
is in the Constitution of the United States, and an institution admitted 
and recognized as part of it, has worked. It is often said that the 
slavery question was the difficulty in the States coming together; and 



310 CHAELES INGEESOLL. 

so partially it was, for South Carolina and Georgia, which were not 
then stocked with black labor, refused to come into the Union on any 
terms, which restricted their importation of negroes from Africa, to 
which the other States objected, and the compromise was effected, 
which limited that trade to a period not to extend beyond the year of 
1808. But it is a mere mistake to suppose that the question of 
slavery made any other difficulty in the Convention. Fanaticism had 
not then showed its head ; the North, as well as the South, held slaves, 
and the slave-trade, as a branch of commerce, was insisted on by a 
portion of New England. The difficulty was between the large and 
small States ; there lay the difficulty ; it was in settling their represen- 
tation in Congress. Under the Confederacy, voting by States, they had 
all been equal ; Delaware casting one vote, and Pennsylvania no more. 
The small States were afraid of being oppressed. They cited, as pre- 
cedents for what they asked, an equal representation in both Houses of 
Congress, the case of the Confederacy and that of the Republic of 
Holland, where the seven united provinces, not only cast equal votes 
without regard to population, but where the central government could 
not lay a tax, nor make a treaty, nor declare war, nor agree to peace, 
without the unanimous consent of all the States. The difficulty in the 
Convention, may be stated in the single word sovereignty ; that was 
the leg the States halted on ; they were jealous of their sovereignty, 
and loath to part with it ; and naturally the smaller the State the greater 
its unwillingness ; and I venture the assertion that until the territorial 
question first presented itself, when Missouri was to be admitted to the 
Union in 1819, it cannot be shown that slavery was ever in the pro- 
gramme of our difficulties. Virginia, and she was followed by the 
greater part of her Southern brethren, always set her face against it, 
till driven from her position by the attempt made in 1819, to exclude 
the whole South from the newly-acquired territory ; an attempt which 
succeeded to the extent of what is called the Missouri Compromise, by 
which slavery was excluded north of the line 36 degrees 30 minutes. 
Virginia was the first country, I believe, in the whole Christian, world, 
to abolish the slave-trade, after long protesting against it, in vain, while 
an English colony. Her gift of the Northwest Territory from which 
have come so many States, was accompanied by the total exclusion 
from it of slavery. Her members on the floor of Congress held strong 
antislavery language. In the year 1810, only three years before the 
revolution made by the Missouri question, John Randolph moved a 
Committee, of which, of course, he was chairman, and one of the 
members of which was Mr. Ilopkinson, of this city, to put a stop to 
what he denounced, with all the bitterness of his eloquence, the slave- 



THE EQUALITY OF THE STATES. 311 

trade in the District of Columbia. It was a member from Virginia, 
who moved, in the first Congress which met, to impose a heavy duty 
on the importation of slaves, in order to break down the traffic, if pos- 
sible, before 1808. When, in the year 1800, the bill passed to abolish 
the trade at its earliest constitutional period, it had in its favor every 
vote present in the House of Representatives from the South, except 
four. Search the debates in Congress, prior to the Missouri question, 
and find if you can, coming from the South, on the subject of slavery, 
more than some little occasional ebullition of temper on the part of a 
member here or there, when touched too hard on this sore place. 
Nothing was done, not much was said, excepting by South Carolina 
and Georgia, when their importation was interfered with, which might 
not have come just as well from Northern members as Southern. 
There was then indeed no North, no South. Virginia led on the 
slavery question, and she led against it, and the rest went with her. 

I challenge contradiction, that this was a continuing fact down to 
the time of the Missouri question, the territorial subject as it first ap- 
peared ; and since then, sir, it has never been fairly quieted, and, I be- 
lieve, never will be while the Democratic party of the North alloys its 
territorial doctrine, and hesitates to occupy the true, solid, simple, and 
only tenable position, that the jointly-acquired territory is equally open 
to all citizens of the Union which acquired it. Gentlemen of this 
Democratic Club, our difficulty has been that we were on ground not 
true, not solid, not simple, and therefore not tenable ; and we have just 
been miserably beaten at the polls tRs among other reasons, and for the f*"" 
only reason, if you strike out the tariff and local questions, because we 
ha\ e placed ourselves in a false position on the territorial question. The 
principles on which party rallies ought to be elementary, and intelli- 
gible, not artificial or strained. How many persons do you suppose 
there are in this room who could satisfactorily explain what the exact 
difference was at Charleston and Baltimore, on which the Democratic 
party split ? 

Be sure, fellow-citizens, that when we are afraid to maintain great 
truths, or seek to disguise them in subtilties and refinements, we 
make a mistake of the first order. Sir, T am told we are very poor ; 
that the party is not only down in spirit, but in pocket, too ; but if a 
few dollars, though they were our last, could be found in the whole 
I h mocratic treasury, or could be raised by hook or by crook, to print 
and circulate in the North some copies of the debate on the Missouri 
bill, they would be well spent. We should there see, forty years too 
late, but still to good purpose, what really few of us are aware of, the 
egregious damage done to our institutions by the whirlwind which at 



sbf 



<5/ 



312 CHAKLES INGEESOLL. 

that time prevailed in the North, and blew reason to tatters. Never 
did storm blow so hard and so long, and not bring so much as a cap- 
ful with it of the wind of doctrine. It was all declamation. No re- 
flecting man now could read the Northern speeches then made without 
being shocked at their nakedness of logic ; no lover of his country, 
without lamenting to see such an unbalancing of the public • mind. 
They teach the painful lesson how small is the voice of reason when 
passion is on the wing. They are not only an index to the history of 
foul thoughts ever since, but they let down and lower our confidence 
in the future; for they plainly show that good men and virtuous 
statesmen can be blind guides. The question was plain, and the answer 
to it within reach of the meanest capacity, not clouded by prejudice : 
it was, will you abridge the sovereignty of the old States ? How can 
you on the sovereignty of the new States lay a restriction, which the 
State once admitted to the Union you have no right to insist upon? 
Sir, it is a little late to argue the Missouri question, and it might 
be difficult to bring better men to the argument than those of 1819-20/ 
, >(" tead those debates, and be satisfied where our present mistake be- 
' gan ; that our first error was there ; that the Southern States were 
right ; that their position was fully and absolutely correct, and noth- 
ing but our feeling might and forgetting right, forced that arrange- 
ment, where the South, in an evil hour for them and us, gave way, 
when they ought to have stood fast. Their yielding has been the 
signal of disorder ever since. I could understand the North saying, 
the Constitution has made no provision for this case of the Territories ; 
we abhor slavery, will not give it an inch more than we are compelled 
to give, and rather than have any more slave territory, we will have no 
more Union. That would have been intelligible. But tell me how to 
understand them when they said, you are bound to stay in the Union, 
when the equal rights of the State, are demolished? There was no 
Northern speech on that great occasion, which exhausted all our elo- 
quence, which answered, or approached an answer, to the Southern in- 
terrogation : What are you going to do with the equality of the 
States '. There were two questions then put, which have never been 
answered. First. Where is the equality of the States, if we can't go 
into the Territories as well as you? and Second. How can you effect 
this act of our degradation without yourselves committing an act of 
absurdity ; namely, admitting Missouri as a sovereign State, the equal 
of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and yet without the right which none 
would deny to Pennsylvania arid Virginia, of moulding their own gov- 
ernment to whatever is not forbidden by the Constitution of the United 
States? What is to prevent Pennsylvania establishing slavery, lying 



THE EQUALITY OF THE STATES. 313 ' 

north of 30° 30'? Nothing. Then, what is to prevent Missouri? 

Nothing. Then where is your Missouri Restriction ? Where is your 

Compromise ? I would li*ke you to tell me where we should have 

been, what the right and wrong of the ease would have been, if the 

State of Michigan, lying north of 36° 30', and, admitted to the Union 

in 1836, and therefore after the Missouri Restriction, had, the day 

after coming into the Union, established slaveryfAhere would have /\&^ ^ y 

been the right to prevent it ? Well, gentlemen, we did not inflict upon 

them the whole injury, as at first proposed, of a total exclusion from 

all new territory, North or South; but the Compromise was made on 

36° 30', and our Southern friends were glad to submit to the wrong, 

and settle with us, thus proving their love at that day of the Union 

and their attachment to us all ; and thus did the South yield the point 

of their equal rights as members of this Union ; thus did they make 

a compromise, which was a surrender. We gave them nothing; they 

gave us what can never be given with impunity by State or man, the 

right to say they had been compelled to yield something where there 

was no right to ask any thing. 

This was in 1820. and now in 1860, they in their turn offer to our 
mouths what the Northern stomach cannot brook. But that is antici- 
pating a little. In 1854 the South yielded to Northern temptation as 
in 1820 they yielded to Northern menace, and the Missouri Compro- 
mise was repealed — a political mistake as great as was its enactment — 
a mistake which the country would take back if they could, but they 
never can. Thirty-six years had passed since 1820, and the compro- 
mise had become part of our political flesh ; or rather, it was like a ball 
sticking in a man'sl^H^ which well nigh killed him to get there, but 
which having in a course of years folded and bedded itself in his fibres, 
extracting it is infinitely more perilous than letting it alone. Every 
thing was torn to pieces to get it out, and a gaping wound remains to 
be healed. I need not call on you to recollect the difficulties of the coun- 
try since, and under which the Democratic party has been staggering. 
Kansas bills, English bills, Lecompton and Anti-Lecompton, minorities 
in Congress and at the polls, and discontent everywhere have been our 
portion, until having met at Charleston to choose a candidate whom, 
with the aid of the God-send we had in the John Brown affair, to apply 
such a name to that atrocity, we could have carried with all ease, we 
broke up with two candidates ; and here we are to hear our enemies, the 
Wide-awakes, beating their daily drum and parading our streets, in all 
the assurance of speedy and complete victory. What does this bring 
us to ? 

In 1819 we wanted to violate, out and out, the rights of the South ; 



314 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

in 1820, we compromised on an act of partial violation of them; in 
1854 this act, which was the Missouri bill, was repealed from the stat- 
ute-book, but not from Northern hearts; and the North, infinitely 
stronger than it was in 1820, has never been quiet under it, but, to tell 
the whole truth in plain words, has been growing less and less demo- 
cratic ever since ; while the South, getting daily more restive under her 
daily increasing inferiority to the North in population and resources, 
now, like the weaker man asking bonds for good behavior.of his more 
muscular neighbor, demands of us not only to admit that the States are 
equal, but to go on and say that equality means things that to the 
North are neither palatable nor intelligible. Mr. Chairman, perhaps I 
had better advance no further; this is a party meeting, and I am party 
man enough to be addressing you ; you may say, if I go further I shall 
get upon the rocks. Sir, there are only two chances for us : one is the 
chapter of accidents, for no one knows what to-morrow will bring forth ; 
the other is the utter and instant rejection by the Northern Democracy 
of all compromise with this infernal antislavery spirit. In other words, 
to go back and stand where every man once stood. This you may say 
is easier said than done ; but can you, Mr. Chairman, or you, fellow- 
citizens, tell me what else will do ? 

A word more, before I sit down. Sir, did you ever ask yourself the 
question, what troops they would be, and in what age, who first would 
enter this town, sword in hand, perhaps to burn it to the ground, per- 
haps only to lay it under contribution, of a few millions paid in the 
market-place ? We are at profound peace with all the outer world, and 
such an event — though time will assuredly bringit forth — you will say now 
seems remote. But suppose we were surrounded with threatening ene- 
mies, why might it not happen to-day ? Very well ; — faction is turned 
loose among us, the worst enemy, and our frame of government is threat- 
ened. 

Is there no danger to-day ? Our fellow-citizens are sinners, — man- 
stealers and slaveholders ; will not set their slaves free ; will carry 
them into the territories! But how often must we be reminded that 
father Abraham was a man-stealer, a slave-breeder, a slaveholder, and 
that he carried his slaves into the territories — that all the Jews, the 
chosen people of God, held slaves under the law derived immediately 
from God himself — that our Saviour coming on earth to teach and re. 
deem us, found the world teeming with them ; white as well as black, 
some of them poets, painters, authors, men of genius and learning — 
that he never pronounced slavery a sin, but said, Slaves, obey your mas- 
ters — that our teachers of to-day, the Abolition party of the North, 
had slaveholders for their fathers and grandfathers. As to our English 



THE EQUALITY OF THE STATES. 315 

teachers, everybody knows they forced the slaves on us; but as one of 
our catalogue of sins is that we call negroes chattels, it may gratify you, 
as a lawyer, sir, to be referred to page 561 of Mr. George Chalmers, an 
English gentleman's collection of the opinions of the English judges and 
other eminent persons on subjects connected with British commerce, 
and read what negroes really are; you will there find the opinion of 
ten of the twelve judges of England, the other two being absent, I 
suppose, from the consultation, in these words : " AVe do humbly cer- 
tify our opinion to be that negroes are merchandise." This paper, all 
of which I do not trouble you with, is styled in the book : " The re- 
port of the whole of the judges upon the Memorial of the African 
Company, touching the assiento, in 1689." 

It is signed with ten names, the first of them being that of the fa- 
mous Chief-Justice Holt; and if the opinion was given in 1689 it dates 
in what the English regard as their best day, just after what they call 
their glorious revolution. Sir, chattels mean, as you know, cattle, and 
people might be content to be called cattle, who never would agree to 
be set down as merchandise. 

Gentlemen, when we find how many frantic and wicked fools are 
among us, and see thousands of good and well-meaning citizens voting 
their ticket, and certainly not horror-struck at their doctrine, it is 
enough to make one despair of the Republic — of this Republic — of any 
Republic ! They tell us all this Southern uproar means nothing, and is 
nothing but spleen and ill-humor— that it is nothing but the process of 
reconciling a minority, to the now inevitable hour when Northern popu- 
lation comes in with final predominance over them. Sir, are we so 
ignorant as not to know the South has always been in a minority from 
the very foundation of the government to the present hour; an<1 that 
their strength henceforth, will consist exactly as hitherto it has, in their 
union among themselves. It is a great mistake the extreme Northern 
party is making, to suppose that the South is down, or ever will be. 
As long as they hold slaves they will never be down. 

But what will be the fifth act of this drama of folly? What are 
your thoughts on the end of the present discontents? Will the South 
act, or only pass resolutions? Whatever is or is not behind the curtain, 
I venture to predict one thing, and that is, that among the gentlemen 
Lincolnites, now so gay, who are rubbing their hands at the prospect 
of power, and ridiculing the idea of danger, there will be plenty of 
blank faces and cow feathers before the fourth of March. "We shall 
see — for quite enough is coming to throw daylight on that — who are 
the chicken-hearted. There will be a crisis, as the merchants say, de- 
pend on it, that will put their nerves to their trumps. Let them have 



316 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

their much longed-for opportunity of what they call putting down the 
South, and we shall see how they will do it. The South may not go 
all lengths, but they will do something, and it will be serious. It is 
true that with a Congress, or even a Senate against him, Mr. Lincoln's 
views and measures, as announced by himself and his followers, cannot 
be carried out. 

He can hardly, without Congress, do as much at Washington, as he says 
he did in Ohio, when he threw, brave man ! " fire-balls into Kentucky.'" 
But regard the case as you may, half the Union is thoroughly pro- 
voked, has been grossly injured, and the act of throwing the whole 
South overboard, and in a Convention avowedly sectional, selecting a 
President who is pledged to their destruction, to a policy which is at 
once unconstitutional, and their ruin, may well be regarded by them 
as an act overt enough. I hope not, but who shall say nay, if they 
choose to think so? I shall conclude, gentlemen, with venturing an 
opinion, which really, as a Pennsylvanian, I am half ashamed to utter, 
that we shall get through this crisis, if we get through at all, mainly 
by the good sense and good management of a certain State, which is 
not Pennsylvania, but a near neighbor of Pennsylvania, a State which 
has always been the p ilot of the Union, and was the pilot of the Con- 
federacy before the Union was formed — I mean Virginia. We call 
ourselves the Keystone, and perhaps we are, but our next door neigh- 
bors are more than that. They, with Massachusetts, made the revo- 
lution — they had more to do with carrying it through than any other 
State, they brought about the Federal Convention that made the Con- 
stitution under which we have prospered, and which, God Almighty 
grant, we are not going to let fall to pieces ; and although with rela- 
tive population, wealth, and resources, for more than sixty years past 
regularly declining, such has been their stuff of character, that they 
have always continued to be, and yet are, the leading State. While 
so many others have, from time to time, played the fool, Virginia never 
has ; and in the late affair of that miserable, but veritable exponent of 
extreme fanaticism — Mr. John Brown — their conduct was perfect; it 
could not have been better ; and their moderation was such, that any- 
body who will examine the proceedings of the Virginia Legislature 
when, after all was over, they were reviewing the subject of that de- 
testable conspiracy, will say, I think, that if they erred at all, it was in 
not going far enough in a just indignation. 

Gentlemen, I propose to you, not three cheers for the Union, for 
they have become a little trite, and often are a little hollow, but a 
thousand cheers for all true hearts, wherever they be, whether in 
Pennsylvania, or Virginia, who, not telling us of their love for the 



A CONVENTION OF THE PEOPLE. 31*7 

Union, will stand up and answer Hamlet's question : " What wilt thou 
DO for her?" 



A CONVENTION OP THE PEOPLE.. 
Meeting of the Democratic Association of the Fifteenth Ward, Phila- 
delphia, April 23, 1863. 
Fellow-Citizens : The Democratic party is reproached by the Re- 
publicans with not having a policy — with being a mere opposition, and 
I am about to endeavor to show that, in a Democratic suggestion which 
has been frequently made, there is a policy which is a specific, — a com- 
prehensive, and healing one, so far as any medicine can provide for so 
vast a malady as ours has become, under the influences which now, for 
more than two years, have been operating upon it. What I propose to 
show is, that at a national juncture like the present, the people must be 
called in — we must have a convention. We are in the midst not only 
of war, but the worst of wars, a civil war, and the conflict threatens to 
change our institutions. It is a war between two geographical sec- 
tions, in which one of the questions is the Union ; and should the war 
end in a dissolution of it, our Federal institutions all go by the board. 
Nothing would be left but the States — thirty-four distinct, disjointed 
States ; for if you divide the country, you cancel the Federal com- 
pact on which the Union depends, and its institutions fall with it. The 
Administration party charge the Democratic party with what they call 
Southern sympathy, and favoring the cause of those who have seceded 
from the Union. The Democratic party charge, not the mass of the 
Republicans, but their leaders, with a purpose to let the South go as a 
part of the country irreconcilable with the Abolitionists, and to use 
their armed force to hold down the North while thev establish a new 
government. Whichever of these charges be false, and whichever the 
true one, the opposing parties agree in this, that the country is in con- 
fusion, and a separation of the States to be apprehended. Once let it 
come, and you have, whether the catastrophe is brought about by the 
Republicans or the Democrats, to set up a new establishment altogether. 
You have no longer a Constitution of the United States, a constitutional 
President, a constitutional Congress, or a constitutional Judiciary, until 
the States give to some like engines of rule their constitutional sanction. 
According to the Constitution your army is disbanded, your navy 
broken up, your treasury can collect no money, your nationality is at an 
end, your flag ceases to float, for the nation which hoisted it no longer 
exists. It is a position which has not yet been denied, that if the 
States should be separated by this war into two Confederacies, the 



318 CHARLES LKGERSOLL. 

whole Union is gone, and we go back again to where we were before 
the Constitution was framed. We should be Pennsylvania merely — a 
foreign State to the other thirty-three. 

This is a consummation which the masses of no party can desire. 
Look out upon the swarming population of this town, and your good 
sense will tell you that when you take them by the thousands, Demo- 
crats and Republicans alike can have no other wish than the prosperity 
of the country. The prosperity of the country is their prosperity. 

I wish to do no injustice to the leaders more than to the rank and 
file of the party we are contending with, and I will support by their 
own authority the assertion that the Administration mean to make root 
and branch work. I give you a few words from a speech delivered on 
the 4th of this month by Mr. Stevens, on his return home, to his 
constituents at Lancaster. _ They coincide, in the main, with what we 
have, from day to day, from the Administration at Washington, and 
from their presses all over the country : 

"According to my poor judgment, the Government must steel itself with sterner 
resolves, and prepare, if need be, for a revolution. First, universal emancipation 
must be proclaimed as a military necessity, with compensation to the few loyal 
slaveholders. * * * 

"But even that great step alone will not be sufficient. As we conquer the 
enemy's country, we must hold it, or the moment our troops are withdrawn, the 
rebels take possession of their old homes and renew hostilities. Let a military 
tribunal be created to follow the army; and as we conquer their territory sell to 
the highest bidder the lands of every rebel to military oleupants, who, with arms 
in their hands, shall take resident possession by themselves or their tenants, and 
be ready to defend it against all comers. Take for example the State of Virginia. 
From the Rappahannock westward and northward (a vast territory), it is in our 
possession. Sell every acre of it belonging to traitors, to bold and loyal settlers. 

" Let the same course be pursued in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, 
so far as rebels are concerned, and those States, having expelled the enemy and 
filled them with loyal men, would soon be able to defend themselves without . 
foreign aid. So in every State to the Gulf of Mexico. 

"The Roman Commonwealth, when she conquered a dangerous nation, expelled 
the inhabitants and planted it with her own citizens. There is no reason why 
we should not do the same." 

Here then you have the object of the men in power. It is to alter 
the face of the land ; for I need not tell you that the South cannot be 
treated as it is proposed to treat them without changing our political 
institutions at the North from top to bottom. They not only must 
dissolve the Union, but to be able to hold up the system which they 
put in its place, they must take away our liberties. But leave it out, if 
you please, that our liberties are at stake. Agree that it is not so. 

Suppose I am overstating the case — that we are not struggling for 



A CONVENTION OF THE PEOPLE. 319 

the liberty of the citizen — that it is all a mistake to think so. » Stop, if 
you choose, two steps short of that, and believe not only that our liberty 
is not in danger, and that our institutions are not to be ruined, but 
that we are altering our institutions for the better. Can the Adminis- 
tration do that ? 

They might give us better ones — a better Government, a stronger 
Government, grander establishments, more power, more army, more 
navy, more debt — but, after this was all done, and well done, it would 
be mere usurpation — for only the people themselves can alter organic 
laws. If the question concerned revenue or internal improvements — if 
it were a tariff, or a point of domestic or foreign policy, it would be 
settled for us by the President and Congress ; and if we were not con- 
tent with their decision, we would appeal to the polls at the next elec- 
tion, and reverse them, by electing a new President and a different 
Congress. But -when it comes to breaking up old institutions and form- 
ing new ones, tell me what the Administration has to do with that. 
The ordinary machinery of Government has no such function ; at such 
stages of the tide the people pilot themselves. 

Fellow-citizens : If I mistake not, a Convention, the call for a 
Convention would be a rallying-point, when once fairly before the coun- 
try, which would make nearly all the votes Democratic — one to which 
every lover of his country might betake himself, which would deprive 
the Abolitionists of the one and only advantage they have of us. 
When, in the midst of the storm which howls around us, they say, 
"You do not support the Administration, what do you mean to do?" 
if there be a plain, simple, tangible answer to give them, it ought to be 
given ; and I believe there is, and that it lies in a Convention of the 
people. It brings the case to its true proportions — it makes the ques- 
tion between the greater and the lesser power — between legitimate and 
illegitimate — between the people themselves and Mr. Abraham Lincoln. 
It offers the remedy, if remedy there be, for in a Convention we put 
forth our whole strength — the strength of the people. 

Gentlemen, we live under two Constitutions — that of the United 
States and that of Pennsylvania ; let me show you how they came 
about, and then you have the evidence before you of what Conventions 
of the people can do. The Republican majority of a Senate Commit- 
tee, at Harrisburg, have lately reported to that body against a Conven- 
tion. They say that since the secession of the Southern States a Con- 
vention is not attainable in the manner pointed out in our existing 
institutions, and would not be lawful ; but I will show you that in 1787 
the Constitution of the United States was brought about, not in the 
manner pointed out by existing institutions. It is now said that eleven 



320 CHAELES INGEESOLL. 

States of the thirty-four having declared themselves out of the Union, 
it is not possible to get three-fourths of thirty-four to ratify changes of 
our system necessary to the reconstruction of the Union. These may 
be obstacles, but you will see how more serious obstacles were dealt 
with by the patriots of 1787. 

You all know that the first Constitution of the United States was 
called Articles of -Confederation, and that it was superseded by the 
present Constitution, framed by a Convention which sat in this city 
from May to September, 1787. By the thirteenth of these Articles, it 
was provided that "the Articles of this Confederation shall#be inviola- 
bly observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual ; nor 
shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them, unless 
such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and 
be afterwards confirmed by the Legislatures of every State." 

This Constitution, which was just as binding as the present one, and 
bad occupied its framers much more time in the making, you see, was 
declared to be perpetual, and not amendable unless the amendments 
were agreed to in a Congress, and afterwards sanctioned by every 
State. When the war of the Revolution was over, it was found that to 
this Constitution there lay this insuperable objection, that the hands of 
the National Government reached only the States, and did not reach 
the people of the States. They dealt with Pennsylvania or Virginia, 
not with the people of those Commonwealths. If they wanted, for 
example, money, the sum for which we were assessed was asked for of 
the State authorities. The United States Government could not collect 
it for themselves. Congress proposed to the States amendments, by 
which they should be invested with power to levy money — only certain 
amounts for certain designated purposes, and none other. The States 
would not consent. A government without power to raise money, you 
know, cannot go on ; and without detaining j r ou with the detail of their 
difficulties, let me say in a word, that such was the state of public con- 
fusion at this time, that in England they looked — and with a degree of 
confident hope — to see us return to our allegiance to the British Crown 
— to our loyalty. But the Americans of that day believed not in loy- 
alty — they were of the disloyal league, and what was the measure to 
which they resorted to block the loyal game ? What was the measure 
for restoring their tottering fortunes ? Was it executive power? Was 
it legislative? A dictatorship ? A proclamation ? Suspension of the 
habeas corpus? Emancipation and confiscation? Not at all. It was 
a Convention of the people! The difference between 1787 and 1863 
is just that. In 1787 the States defied the central government — a 
dissolution of the Union was at hand — and they called a Convention. 



A CONVENTION OF THE PEOPLE. 321 

In 18G3 the central government defies the States, and a dissolution of 
the Union is at hand. But they say, Oh ! never mind that ; we want no 
conventions ; executive power is good enough for us ! At the crisis of 
1787, the Washingtons, Franklins, and Hamiltons turned to. the might 
and wisdom of the people, and there looked for succor. The Loyal 
Leagues of 1863 look neither to the right nor left; they leave it all to 
Mr. Lincoln ! 

Well, the Convention met. It sat in this city, and I want you to 
examine their work. I have shown you the article by which the Con- 
federacy was declared perpetual, and the Constitution not to be 
changed without the consent of every State. It required the consent 
of every State to break up the Articles of Confederation, or even 
to amend them in the smallest particular; but the Convention once 
assembled was the people — the people in council — the people who had 
made the Confederation — and they determined that whatever was re- 
quired for the general good, that they could do. The final difficulty 
then, as now, lay in New England. It was then confined to the little 
State of Rhode Island. Under the old Union each State governed its 
own custom-house, and made its own tariffs ; and little Rhode Island, 
which has hardly any territory to plough or pasture, has two fine sea- 
ports. The consequence was that, through duties on her imports, 
which were infinitely beyond her own consumption, she could tax, and 
did tax, the whole country ; the consumer, as you are aware, paying 
eventually always the custom-house duty. Of the foreign merchandise 
consumed in the United States, all which came through Rhode Island, 
and that was no small portion of it, paid a tax to the government of 
that Republic. Rhode Island taxed the Urnon. Rhode Island, there- 
fore, not only refused to agree to amendments by which Congress could 
lay duties on her imports, but when the Convention met they would 
have nothing to do with it; they refused to send delegates to it — to an 
assembly which was destined to diminish their revenue. And they had 
a perfect right to refuse; it was Constitutional and lawful to refuse; 
whether it was patriotic might be another thing. The Convention sat 
— every State represented but Rhode Island — and on the 1 7th of Sep- 
tember, 1787, adjourned, after drafting a Constitution, and recommend- 
ing its adoption by the States. But how did they treat the clause of 
the old Constitution, by which to change it the unanimous vote of all 
the States was required? They said : " The ratification of the Conven- 
tions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Con- 
stitution between the States, so ratifying the same." Thus spoke the 
Convention of the people ; and you see that if the will of nine States 
superseded the old Constitution, the other four of the thirteen were, to 
21 



322 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

use a phrase which lias become proverbial, and therefore respectable, 
left out in the cold! Such, these men thought, was the virtue and 
power of a convention. The people could do lawfully by inherent 
right what Mr. Lincoln di es unlawfully, they could fall back on the 
rule of necessity — the law of self-preservation, not military necessity, 
but the doctrine which no free citizen can deny, or even blink, that the 
safety of the Republic is in the keeping of the people. 

What they did differs from Mr. Lincoln's doing- the same thing as 
the execution of a criminal by due process of justice differs from put- 
ting the man to death by lynch law — one is murder, the other is not. 
One is the right, the other none at all. Read the names signed to this 
paper which gave effect to the will of the country, beginning with 
George Washington, and tell me then that a convention has not author- 
ity for any emergency, and cannot encounter and overcome any obsta- 
cles. Let us go on — here was a new Constitution to take the place of 
the old when ratified by nine States. Eleven ratified — the twelfth 
North Carolina, refused, the vote of their Convention being against it; 
and Rhode Island, whose custom-house advantages I have explained to 
yon, making one hundred and forty per cent, profit on her commercial 
capital through the misfortunes of the country — as now, we learn by 
the newspapers, she and her New England sisters make the one hun- 
dred and forty per cent, on their manufacturing capital, through the 
misfortunes of the country, would not so much as call a convention to 
think of coming into the new Union — "to form a more perfect Union" 
was not to be thought of for a moment. 

Well, the country had said that Conventions could do any thing, and 
on the 4th of March, 1789, a government was organized, with Wash- 
ington at the head of it. Congress began to pass laws, and North 
Carolina yielded and became part of the Union. It only remained now 
to conquer Rhode Island, and how do you suppose that was effected ? 
How do you think they dealt with little hundred and forty per cent.? 
By blockading her ports, and crying onto Richmond, you will tell me. 
Not at ad, gentlemen. Under date of the 19th May, 1790, you will find 
on the Journals of the House of Representatives, these words : 

"A message from the Senate informed the House that they have passed a bill 
to prevent bringing goods, wares, and merchandise from the State of Rhode 
Island and Providence Plantations into the United States, and to authorize a de- 
mam 1 of money from the said State, to which they desire the concurrence of this 
House." 

This, you perceive, was a bill to prevent the gallant little State from 
taxing the other twelve — to declare her a foreign country — and it 
brought forth fruit, for on the 1st of June, only eleven days after, 



A CONVENTION OF THE PEOPLE. 323 

Washington, by message to both Houses, made known the ratification 
and adoption of the Constitution of the United States by the State of 
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Thus, gentlemen, was 
formed your Union. A Convention did it; a Convention compelled it. 
Here was a vigorous prosecution of the will of the people. I tell you, 
fellow-citizens, Washington, had he been at the head of the old Con- 
federacy, commanding a large army, with unlimited power, and the 
Abolitionists behind to advise him, could no more have made the 
Union than Mr. Lincoln can break it. No man, no government could 
have done it : — the people alone were capable of it ; they may be wise 
or foolish ; I do not enter upon that question, but the power lies there 
— it is in them and nowhere else. 

I may be a very insignificant person, but to control and regulate that 
which is my own, I am better than the best of you. 

The difference between the power of the people, and the power of 
Mr. Lincoln, is, that the compulsion of the people is legitimate com- 
pulsion ; the other compulsion is usurpation. 

A Convention may do by the country as they will, but Mr. Lincoln 
may not. "All power is inherent in the people." It is not inherent 
in the President, or in the President and both Houses of Congress. 
They cannot change our institutions, introduce a military government, 
abolish slavery, do away State Rights, reconstruct the Union. The 
people alone can do such things. And here, gentlemen, let me give 
you a piece of advice ; the next time you are asked why you do not 
support the Government, tell your Republican friend that you do sup- 
port it, and mean to continue to support it, but not in measures 
which can be resorted to only by the people when they meet in Con- 
vention. 

Thus operated in the last century the irresistible will of the people ; 
they forced, or coaxed — call it what you please — they brought about 
the Constitution of the United States. But, perhaps the Abolitionists 
will tell us the Union always was a covenant with a place which they 
tell us a great deal about, but I will not venture to name ; that slavery 
was too powerful in 1*787 to make any thing done at that time a safe 
precedent. Washington had a hand in it; he was nothing but a Vir- 
ginian ; he was an aristocrat — a dealer in human flesh. Very well, 
then, let us sec how you came by your own Constitution here in Penn- 
sylvania, where slavery never was uppermost. In 1776 we made our 
first Constitution, and probably not an altogether bad one, for at the 
head of the Convention which framed it, was Dr. Franklin, who besides 
being a genius of a very high order, a philosopher, a discoverer, a diplo- 
matist, was always a Democrat. But this Constitution had several 



324 CHARLES LNGERSOLL. 

peculiarities, as we should now regard them; among the rest, the legis- 
lative body consisted of one house and not two, and there was a coun- 
cil of Censors, whose office somewhat resembled that of the Roman 
Censors, and among their functions was that of observing the working 
of the Constitution and calling conventions, should they be of opinion 
that it needed change. The provision was express that amendments 
could be reached only through the Censors. In 1*784, the people of 
Pennsylvania having become discontented with the Constitution of 
177(5, and the question of altering it having been much agitated, this 
Council, after considering and deliberating upon it, determined not to 
call a convention, and published an address to the State, setting forth 
their reasons. 

But the people did not agree with the Censors, and elected to the 
Legislature Representatives who passed a resolution that, " alterations 
and amendments of the Constitution" were required, and that the 
people could "not be limited to any certain rule or mode" of making 
alterations, " but may make choice of such method as to them may ap- 
pear best adapted to the end proposed." They accordingly passed a 
bill, under which were elected members to a convention, and when 
that convention met they cancelled the Constitution, and gave us a 
new one, that which ever since we have lived under, though it was 
somewhat amended in 1837. Here is history again. You cannot, as 
Mr. Lincoln tells us, blot out history, and it still teaches the lesson of 
the power of the people. I asked you, if you doubted the political 
right of reaching the Constitution of the United States in 1787, by 
breaking down the provisions of the old one, to read the names signed 
to the draught, and I would ask you now to observe the signers of our 
Constitution of 1790. There sat in it not only Governor Mifflin, Gov- 
ernor McKean, Governor Snyder, Governor Hiester, Mr. James Ross, 
Mr. Gallatin, and other distinguished and conservative citizens, but 
you will find there for the first time on the rolls of fame, a name des- 
tined to be ever illustrious, that of Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln 
of 1790 must have been a Democrat, for he represented the county of 
Berks. 

Let us hope that future ages will not confound a citizen, who 
lent his aid to build a State, with the man whose effort is to pull one 
down ! 

I have shown you that you owe the Union, and your existing State 
institutions, as practical facts, to your ancestors acting on the rule that 
the power to do any tiling lay in the hands of the people. I desire 
now to bring doctrine to the support of facts. You have seen the con- 
crete ; look at the abstract. Look at what wise men said ; read 



A CONVENTION OF THE PEOPLE. 325 

their principles as they wrote them out for their contemporaries and for 
posterity. On the 24th of March, 1789, the Legislature of Pennsyl- 
vania, in the course of their proceedings, preliminary to calling the 
Convention of 1790, came to a resolution, in which they laid it down, 
that " the community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible 
right to reform, alter, and abolish government, in such manner as shall 
be by that community judged most conducive to the public weal," 
which passed by a vote of 47 yeas, against 17 nays. Among the yeas 
are the names of Mr. William Lewis, the eminent lawyer of this city, 
a decided Federalist, and of Mr. George Clymer, the ancestor of the 
present distinguished Senator from Berks, a man of the highest con- 
sideration. These words were adopted from the Bill of Rights of the 
Constitution of '70, framed, as I have said, by the Convention over 
which Dr. Franklin presided. Again, on the 22d of February, 1837, 
the Amendments of the Constitution of 1790 were signed in this city 
by a Convention, composed a majority of them of Whigs, and over 
which presided the late Mr. John Sergeant, a man whom many of you 
knew personally, whose patriotism was earnest — that is true — but con- 
trolled by his learning, his integrity, his ability, his unblemished honor, 
who never, in his long and useful life, put his name to extreme lan- 
guag ■ empty words, or words which he had not weighed. 

I forbear to quote other names to the same paper, names of distin- 
guished citizens yet living, who are now devoted, and I doubt not con- 
scientious adherents of our present rulers, both at Washington and 
Harrisburg. Listen to what these persons said — to what every mem- 
ber of the Convention said (Mr. Stevens alone excepted), and signed 
their names to, in the year 1837, at no period of public excitement, not 
at a time when there could be the smallest excuse for taking doubtful 
ground : 

" All power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on 
their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and happiness; i'or 1 he ad- 
vancement of these ends, they have, at all times, an unalienable and indefeasible 
right to alter, reform, or abolish their Government, in such manner as they may 
think proper." 

Observe, I do not quote the Pennsylvania Declaration of 1776, or the 
Declaration of Independence of the United States, for this sort of lan- 
guage. Those were State papers, which made a revolution, and of 
them it might be said — yes, that is all very well, but it is the revo- 
lutionarv right of which they speak — the right of the people to rise 
and redress intolerable wrong. 

I give you the judgment of statesmen quietly proceeding to a polit. 
ical task in a time of profound peace, and what they said in 1837 is 



326 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

what Washington did in 1787, and what we both said and did in 1790. 
But to go on. This ultimate right of the people is and has been, 
(especially when used for the public safety on great occasions), for two 
hundred years, ascertained and fixed doctrine in parts even of the Old 
World. Two centuries ago, when General Monk arrived with his 
forces at London, in February, 16G0, England was at his feet by mili- 
tary necessity. lie could have brought about all he wanted, and re- 
stored the monarchy by an order of the day, but what did he do ? 
He asked for a Convention. He saw, at that early period, that the 
people alone could alter the institutions of the land ; he was a quiet, 
solid man, and wished to see his work properly done. When twenty- 
eight years afterwards, in the same country, in 1688, the king threat- 
ened their rights, what did they do ? They called another Convention, 
and settled their liberties on a basis which has lasted to the present 
time. Even in France, in 1789, under the old monarchy, which was 
absolute by the laws of the kingdom, the perplexed monarch called for 
the States-General. The King, who reigned by the grace of God, had not 
become infected among the fountains of Versailles, with the disease which 
makes his successor write himself Emperor, by the grace of God, and the 
will of the French people ; but in the royal ignorance, which then prevail- 
ed, it was thought there was a magic in this new power — the people — from 
which they expected some relief. Fellow-citizens, we know — the last 
two years have taught us that — that the people are no magicians at all; 
that our Democratic stuff is sometimes no better than the " stuff that 
dreams are made of;" but among the lessons of our sad experience we 
have not, thank God, learned — though there are desperate efforts to 
teach us — that the' people — weak, gullible, and human as they arc — 
are not a little more powerful and a little more wise than those who 
would set themselves up for their masters and preceptors. Fellow-citizens, 
whence came power? From the people; they created the Constitu- 
tion — the Constitution did not create them. Where, then, is the 
power not found in the Constitution ; that residuum of power 
which is needed at a national crisis, for national salvation ? Where 
should it be, but in the people ? It is a logical deduction from the fact 
of our living under limited governments, that this final conservative 
residuum of power is in the people. The most hide-bound people in 
the world are the English ; but what do we see happen every four or five 
years, in that country, where there is supposed to be no residuum of 
power — where Parliament is omnipotent/and has every drop and every 
inch of it ? Do we not see an appeal from King, Lords, and Commons, 
to the polls ? Does not the minister, when the road becomes rough, 
dissolve the Parliament, and appeal to the people ? In as small an 



A CONVENTION OF THE PEOPLE. 327 

affair as their late Chinese war, when they come to a sticking-place, 
there is a dissolution of Parliament, and a general election. In a great 
crisis, as that of the Reform question, in 1832, they relieve themselves 
by leaving it to the people. 

Gentlemen, the most alarming symptom of our case, the worst devel- 
opment of the last two years, is the difficulty of bringing the voice of 
the people to bear. Everybody knew that bad men might get into 
power ; but nobody knew that in these United States of ours* when 
they had the helm in their hands, they could rush the ship onwards, 
utterly regardless of the people. Did not both sides agree that the 
last fall elections would settle every thing? Who would have thought 
they would settle nothing? Who would have believed that the authori- 
ties of the United States, after the people had declared everywhere 
against them, would have treated the elections, as a distinguished Re- 
lican once said, as if they had not taken place? 

it is no doubt true, as rumor gave it to us at the time, that when the 
result of those elections was known at Washington, Mr. Lincoln's Gov- 
ernment at first meant to yield to the people, and that to brazen it out 
was second thoughts — the wild and extravagant second thought of des- 
perate gamblers. If we are to be as helpless for the next two years as 
we have been for the last two; if the people are so unwieldy a body 
that they cannot help themselves, free government is a failure. What 
is everybody's business is nobody's business — that is a proverb — and 
when the Constitution is coming to mischief, to prevent it is nobody's 
business until there is a convention. What the Administration means 
is a recognition of the Southern Confederacy as soon as the country can 
be brought to submit to it. It is Mr. Seward's dream and our night- 
mare. They will force it down your throats, if you do not rouse 
yourselves. 

Now, what can the Democratic party do better than write on their 
colors, "A Convention of the People/" Then when our Republican 
friends say to us, what do you want? we will answer them, we want to 
bring to bear on this tremendous question which now shakes the earth 
on which we stand, the only power which is competent to cope with it. 

Your Administration is a small affair; it cannot alter, it cannot deal 
with change (I don't mean greenbacks, but eclipses — that sort of politi- 
cal change which affrights men, and makes nations " yawn at altera- 
, iktion"W Mr. Lincoln was put where he is to administer — not to add, 
} /\lter 'and renew. We want, when a great lift is to be made, a great 
lever to make it. The patient is very ill ; we want the best physician, 
. the best nurse, the most powerful medicine. The tempest is high, the 
ship is on the rocks ; we need an interposing Deity that can still the 



328 CHAELES INGERSOLL. 

waves, and cause the winds to cease. Many a well-meaning, harmless 
Republican is voting for Mr. Lincoln because he thinks there is nothing 
else to do. If be ask you exactly what it is your Convention, with all 
its power, could do for us, tell him it can come to a settlement with 
the South, and restore the Union, which Mr. Lincoln could not do if he 
would, and his masters would not let him do if he could. Did you 
ever hear — did you ever read — if your reading has been limited make 
it extensive, and then tell me whether you have found in history the 
solitary, single instance of a quarrel between sister States in which the 
cry was unconditional submission — no compromise with traitors? Why, 
gentlemen, King George III., the most pig-headed and perverse gentle- 
man of his day, when we rebelled, made us offer after offer of terms, 
and to back one of them, sent over to this city of Philadelphia, where 
he lived for some time, the Earl of Carlisle and two other commission- 
ers, to treat with us of peace and reconciliation. 

You have seen in all the newspapers that an offer was received at 
Washington and rejected, in December last, from the South to the 
North, to return to the LTnion. That there is a degree of exaggeration 
in this maybe imagined; but until the Government at Washington 
condescend to inform us what the whole truth is, we may reasonably 
suppose that from a Southern quarter, which was at least respectable, 
such an overture was made. And why not? 

Fellow-citizens, if these Southern men have proved themselves, since 
the rupture took place, to have a thousand times the brains of Mr. Lin- 
coln and his advisers — and that nobody can doubt — how can anybody 
doubt that their good sense will point them to reconciliation and recon- 
struction ? Let us try them ! At least, don't tell me that a sensible 
man will give you a fool's answer before you have tried him. 

To believe that the Southern masses would refuse to reconstruct this 
Union when the Democratic party made the offer, is to believe they 
have lost their senses. 

Fellow-citizens, the main difficulty is with the North, not the South ; 
with the party who plotted to dissolve the Union long before South 
Carolina did; the party who to-day would stand you and me shoulder 
to shoulder with emancipated negroes in the ranks of war, to lay waste 
the South, and put the population to the sword without distinction of 
age or sex, rather than restore the Union ; the party which, in the ex- 
tremity of their hate and horror of a Union, of which the South is 
part, pours forth upon you, the friends and supporters of the Union, 
their daily floods of noisy vituperation. 

We heed them not ; let them howl on. What the Democratic party 
wants is, their Union and Constitution back again ; that Union and 



PARTY CONSERVATISM. 329 

that Constitution which the leaders of these misled Republicans have, 
for years, been denouncing; that flag which the Democratic party car- 
ried to honor and renown, and which the Abolitionists did nothing but 
scoff at till it was unfurled against the South. Where was the oppo- 
sition to the Democratic party — where was New England — when we 
displayed our banners against Great Britain ? Why, fellow-citizens, if 
they could have had their way, there would have been no glory for that 
flag; it would have been a poor, sneaking, commercial bunting that 
never smelt gunpowder — a pitiful rag fit only to hoist over a cargo. 

Fellow-citizens, I conclude as I began, by recommending that the 
Democratic party offer to this bleeding land, and to the Republicans, who 
go to bed to be physicked by those fiery quacks, the Abolitionists, the 
consoling hope — the tangible, the true, the broad, deep, practical, lawful, 
and legitimate remedy, to be found in the might and right of the peo- 
ple, manifesting itself in conventions. When we are asked what we 
would have, let us say an appeal to the people. When we are asked 
the time when a cure can take place, ask the questioner how long it will 
be before Mr. Lincoln will have brought about one. 



PARTY CONSERVATISM. 



Meeting of the Democratic Club, Manayunk, Philadelphia, June 10, 
1863. 

Fellow-Citizens : It is a question well worth any man's curiosity, 
whether the party who follow the persons who have in their keeping the 
President of the United States appreciate the perils of his Administra- 
tion. In a country like ours, where not a few fortunate individuals, but 
the mass of the people are educated, comfortable, and happy, a strong 
conservative feeling pervades society. Men, with us, are to be found 
only here and there, at rare intervals, who have any thing to gain by 
public confusion ; and the protection of person and property by the 
law, which in some parts of the world is a luxury, was, until two years 
ago, all over the United States, held by the humblest citizen as one of 
the commonest of his rights and a necessity of his life. Now, where 
everything belongs to the people, and is dear to the people, where they 
want things preserved and not destroyed, what are we to think of such 
a Government as that of Mr. Lincoln and such a party as that which 
sustains him ? 

Fellow-citizens: The Republicans, as led by the Abolitionists, 
have not about them an iota of conservatism ; they are essentially a 



330 CHAELES INGEESOLL. 

revolutionary party, and the Democrats are the conservatives of the 
United States. If you will look at the foreign press you will see your- 
selves constantly so designated. I have not seen the adherents of Mr. 
Lincoln there called Jacobins, but you will see them so described and 
treated ; and to the Democrats the one plain, and to us the entirely 
new name, is applied — they call us conservatives. This is the judgment 
of the world. ' 

Gentlemen, the Democratic party, in a certain sense, has always been 
conservative ; it has been the party of the country ; the party which 
not only united itself frankly and heartily with the free and open insti- 
tutions of the country, but which, professing full faith in liberal princi- 
ples, almost whenever the question came up of relying on them, has 
voted in the affirmative. It was in this way the party to which, natur- 
ally .so to speak, the country belonged, and therefore the party for taking 
good care of it. In this sense, when they stood opposed to the old 
Federalists, and then to their successors, the Whigs, they might have 
styled themselves conservative ; but understood in any other manner, 
and looking to their measures and party creeds, the Federal and Whig 
parties were more conservative than we were. Mr. Hamilton was more 
conservative than Mr. Jefferson. How, then, have we changed places ? 
Gentlemen, it is plain enough we have not changed at all ; we are where 
we always were, but the party opposed to us have got themselves a new 
master, and he has made a new man of them. The old Federal party 
was a party of principles, and they adhered to them. The Whigs 
dealt more in expedients, and, for the sake of success, sometimes co- 
alesced with political fragments less worthy than themselves ; but the 
distinguished men who led their fortunes, though not very successful in 
attaining power, never could be tempted to sacrifice honor in the pur- 
suit of it. But in the summer of 1852 died their great leader, Mr. 
Clay, and in October, of the same year, Mr. Webster followed him to 
the grave, and then the Abolition element of the opposition to the 
Democratic party — an element " as rash as fire" — which, though often 
struggling to rise to the top, had been kept down by those statesmen, 
came directly forward — it came into play under the auspices of Mr. 
Seward, not a statesman, but undeniably a politician. Incessant anti- 
r slavery agitation, and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise/ four years 
after Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster had left the stage, strengthened them 
prodigiously. So great was their accession of force that in the Con- 
gress of 1856-58, an avowed Abolitionist, Mr. Banks, of Massachu- 
setts, was selected as their candidate for Speaker of the House, and, 
after balloting from the 3d of December, 1856, to the 2d of February, 
1857 — during all which time the House remained unorganized — Mr. 



PARTY CONSERVATISM. 331 

Banks at last was carried in triumph to the chair, and Abolitionism sat 
at the head of the representatives of the people. From that hour of 
their success, the opposition to the Democratic party has been controlled 
by Abolitionism. True it is that a large and respectable portion of the 
old Whigs supported, in 185G, Mr. Fillmore, and, in 1860, Mr. Bell as 
their candidates for the Presidency, but much of that opposition be- 
came Abolitionized. The Abolitionists it was who showed them the 
way to power. It lay through the negro question, and they followed 
it — they have followed it, gentlemen, across the body of the Constitu- 
tion — over the ruins of the Union ! 

At the succeeding Presidential election they ran an Abolition candi- 
date in Mr. Fremont, and at the election which followed, that of 1860, 
they elected Mr. Lincoln. Both were candidates selected on what may 
be called revolutionary principles — the principle which teaches to take 
small men to bring about great objects, when the objects are revolu- 
tionary — when they are objects at which statesmen would start back. 

If the Abolitionists had been less determined on driving home their 
doctrines — if I am so to denominate their schemes of destruction — and 
had taken Mr. Seward instead of Mr. Lincoln, the Union would have 
been saved, for Mr. Seward had strength enough to resist an onslaught 
which has dragged Mr. Lincoln to his ruin. He would have saved 
himself from his friends. He would not only have preferred, as doubt- 
less Mr. Lincoln did, a whole land to a divided one, but he would have 
had sense enough to keep it whole. But Mr. Lincoln was their man. 
Now what was the position, when they first came in, of the party which 
had taken him for their chief? The leaders had in him, whether honest 
or dishonest, a question which posterity may settle for us, a man to do 
their bidding. But of the voters of the United States who had made 
him President, these Abolition leaders, though the influencing charac- 
ters, were a very small fraction indeed; and the bidding of party 
leaders, however absolute their will, must wait for favoring circum- 
stances and be regulated by events. Now look at the events, and see 
how Abolitionism turned, with the aid of them, the Conservative flank 
of the Republican masses. As Mr. Lincoln was taking possession of 
the reins of Government, State after State was leaving the Union. 
Secession was taking its stand. Abolitionism stood where it always 
stood, for those men, to do them justice, never flinch. The voice of 
their deluded Republican followers was for peace at any price — for 
peace at any price, and for union if possible. None of them thought 
of a war for the Union, a war for the abolition of slavery, a war for the 
subjugation of the South, a war for national honor, or revolution for 
any purpose. The party attitude was tame, it was any thing but revo- 



332 CHAELES INGERSOLL. 

lutionary. Take Mr. Lincoln's Inaugural Address, delivered after six 
States — South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and 
Florida — had passed their ordinances of secession and left us. In it 
you have the Republicans of the winter of 1860-1. What did Mr. 
Lincoln say their programme was? lie had no purpose, he said, 
" directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institutions of slavery in 
the States where it exists;" he believed he had "no lawful right to do 
so." He would, he said, hold the Government property, he would 
collect custom-house duties, but use no force " beyond what was neces- 
sary to those objects; and in places where hostility to the United 
States" should be " so great and universal as wholly to prevent the 
accomplishment of them, they were to be left wholly unattempted," the 
right of the Government being rather foregone to enforce the exercise 
of "these offices" "than accomplished or attempted by means which 
must be " irritating." The mails, he modestly added, were to be car- 
ried in the seceded States, if they would let Mr. Lincoln carry them ; 
and, finally, his great and ruling desire was emphatically declared to be 
that the people everywhere should "have that sense of perfect security 
which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection." This was the 
programme ; and do not forget that at this time all Federal property in 
those six States, excepting some three or four forts which were inacces- 
sible, had been seized by violence, and was in as full possession of the 
seceding State authorities as ever it had been in that of the Federal 
authorities. In short, the Republican party and the Republican chief, 
profoundly alarmed at close sight of dangers, which, when more remote, 
they had defied and provoked, went beyond conservatism and sunk to 
the lowest point of meekness. But not so the Abolition leaders — they 
only bided their time, and soon it came. With the 12th of April came 
the attack on Fort Sumter. This gross and preposterous outrage, which 
did not change the case, changed the scene, transported the North 
beyond the point of patience, inflamed men of all parties, and passion 
ruled the hour. It raised a whirlwind ; Abolitionism seized the critical 
moment and did not hesitate, jumped into the car, snatched the reins, 
and has ever since directed the storm. They instantly called Congress 
together, and asked through the message of the 4th July, 1861, of their 
poor, passive Mr. Lincoln, for " 400,000 men, and 400,000,000 dollars," 
to begin their revolution, to make, as the message expressed it, "the 
contest a short and decisive one." 

When the call was issued summoning Congress, which was the day 
after the reduction of Fort Sumter, one, and only one item more of 
Federal property had passed to the possession of the secessionists; ex- 
cepting which, and excepting that instead of a dead calm there was a 



PARTY CONSERVATISM. 333 

high wind blowing, every thing was exactly as it had been at the 
delivery of the Inaugural Address. But the wind made the difference ; 
it had brought Abolitionism to the helm, and there it is yet. It en- 
abled them to begin their work in earnest — to gather the reward of 
thirty years' labor. 

To make a weak man President, and gratify the passions and long- 
nursed vengeance of his managers, we have parted with more than half 
our territory and about a third of our population. It will take a cen- 
tury to recover back the character we have lost, and re-edify free insti- 
tutions which we have seriously damaged all over the world. We have 
a conscription bill and an income tax ; we have a debt, which will be 
paid as soon as men can be found who do not know gold dollars from 
paper ones. A California adventurer, tossed up into a commander-in- 
chief, threatens us with his heel ; Mr. Secretary of State touches a bell 
on his right hand, and a citizen of Ohio goes to a fortress; on his left, 
and it is a citizen of New York ; Government spies surround us on 
every side ; our political system is tottering ; the bonds of society are 
becoming every day looser ; the torrent of a war, attended by carnage 
such as modern times have not witnessed, sweeps us every day further 
and further from the hope of reconstructing the Union, while there does 
not seem to be in anything but reconstruction the reasonable prospect 
of an escape for the great Republic from the fate of her sisters of the 
South American continent. 

It is to-day the simple truth, that the Republican party, and with them 
no small portion of the old Whigs, are hurried along by men wdiom, as 
lately as in the latter part of the time of Mr. ('lav and Mi-. Webster, 
they stigmatized and denounced as unprincipled bigots, utterly unfit to 
be trusted with power. For those respectable gentlemen — I say nothing 
of their wild and reckless leaders — there can be but one apology. If 
they believe, if the events of the last twenty years — if having seen this 
people turn to folly, and become what they are to-day, has brought 
conviction to their minds, that our system of broad and open freedom 
is a failure — that we must retrace our steps, and by means, good or ill, 
change it from top to bottom for stronger institutions, with military or 
monarchical elements — if that is what they mean, then I understand 
them. Rut if they are believers in our capacity for self-government, 
their weakness in yielding to the revolutionary courses of their anti- 
slavery masters is a fault and a crime for which there is no excuse. 

Gentlemen, you may tell your Republican friends we are paying the 
penalty of revolution when we have no more occasion for a revolution 
than we have for an earthquake. This revolution of 1860 is the volun- 
tary work of men's hands — it was brought on by a handful of men.. 



334 CHAELES INGERSOLL. 

The out-and-out Abolitionists will tell you so, they have told you so, a 
hundred times. They put in a Government with the task of tearing 
every thing to pieces, to build up again, we know not what, or what is 
at best but an unsubstantial dream, the fancied equality of races be- 
tween which God has made differences which defy the power of man. 
We have made a revolution, and rebelled, not against tyranny and taxes, 
but against the laws of Heaven, and the persons who made us rebels 
have been, as their history shows — written by themselves — in rebellion 
against man and God ever since Puritanism took its rise, now more than 
two hundred years ago. These are the people, who by their untiring 
industry, by their unflinching zeal, by their talents, their learning, their 
coalitions, their agitations, their work above the ground and under, 
have at last got possession of the Government of the United States — 
whose plans are now developed — who have, since the 4th March, 1861, 
thrown away, one after another, every rag of moderation. Conserva- 
tism they denounce as a crime against the State. They give it the name 
of the highest crime ; they call it treason. You and I are traitors ; and 
the reason is, because we counsel moderation ; because we advocate 
conciliation, compromise, and Union. Not to be a traitor, you must 
declare yourself for a Union of a conquered and ruined South, with a 
North to trample on it. 

But, gentlemen, recollect there is no such thing as a revolution to 
order, a revolution at the order of this or that man, at the order of Mr 
Lincoln or Mr. Seward, at the order of the Boston Liberator, or the 
Anti-Slavery Society, a revolution with which the heart of the country 
and the material interests of the people have nothing to do — have noth- 
ing in common. Revolution, to be useful and necessary, is a great 
effect, for which there must be a great corresponding cause. Its pre- 
paration is the work of ages. You remember the answer to the poor 
girl who asked relief at a door, which proved to be that of a Magdalen 
hospital. " You must go and qualify yourself'' said the porter, " by 
prostitution. We do nothing for honest folks here" We must go and 
qualify ourselves for revolution by misery, by crimes, by a few centuries 
of oppression. Without the preparatory exercises, we only make our- 
selves ridiculous ; we give birth to a race of pigmies. After we shall 
have been long enough under the harrow to acquire — what yet we have 
not an atom of — the energy of revolution — we shall begin to produce 
statesmen and generals. 

Dire necessity, imminent peril, having to fight a country between 
two and three times stronger than they are, and incalculably richer, has 
set the other party to this revolution — the sluggish South — to produ- 
cing, has brought them not only wise heads for council and skilfuHMWMte for 



PAETY CONSERVATISM. 335 

the field, but made their whole territory hum with mechanical industry ; 
has given them for their own that commerce and those manufactures 
which, before Mr. Lincoln changed all that, they leftto us, while we of 
the North, who began with "on to Richmond," and the impression that 
we had only to " crush them 1 ' and " wipe them out," that our task was 
the easiest and simplest that New England ever set to its disciples — we 
will begin to be great, according to the law of forces ,and rules of the 
economy of nations, after misery shall have driven us to it — when we 
shall have reduced ourselves to the condition which makes men desperate. 
The Revolution of '76 came when events had ripened it; it came 
because the time had come when we would no longer remain at the 
apron-string; when we were of age and declared our majority. The 
revolution which followed it in France, in 1789, had its cause in a high- 
spirited people owning but a third of the land, and out of it paying all 
the taxes, while the priests and nobles who owned the other two-thirds 
paid no taxes at all, and ruled them with a heavy hand beside. But 
who laid a heavy hand on us, and what taxes did we pay til! Mr. Lincoln's 
time? And as for revolution, which turns on the desire to part from 
the parent stem — to part from one another — to break in two — certainly 
the South never wanted that, nor did we of the North, unless 
proselytes were made to it by Mr. Lincoln when he explained that 
inclination to the House of Representatives in 1848. Let me remind 
you of what he said. Here was his doctrine as reported in the debates 
of the day : " Any people, anywhere being inclined" said he, " and 
having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing 
Government, and form a new one that suits them better. Nor is the 
right confined to cases, in which the whole people of an existing Govern- 
ment may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, 
may revolutionize and make their own, of so much of the territory as 
they inhabit More than this, a majority of any portion of such 
people may revolutionize, putting down a minority intermingled with 
or near about them who may oppose their movements." I say, gentle- 
men, unless this vile trash be political logic accepted at North or South, 
unless we were ripened for revolution by some people in the South be- 
ing " inclined" to go, or by some people in the North being " inclined" 
to make the South go ; unless that made the ripeness, there was no 
ripeness at all. But, no ! gentlemen, the statesman of 1860 was a babe 
in 1848. He was not, as another great man said, he was not — "nursed 
and dandled into statesmanship ;" — for a greater, a more fatal mistake, 
no people can make than, as he recommended in 1848, to jump into 
the gulf of revolution only because " portions of such people that can, 
may revolutionize!" It is exactly for the reason which, in 1848, Mr. 



336 CHARLES HSTGERSOLL. 

Lincoln thought a good one, that our revolution is a folly, an unmitigated 
and unqualified curse. We have made it, forsooth, not because the 
people needed it, and time and events demanded it, but because Mr. 
Garrison was inclined to it — Mr. Wendell Phillips was inclined to it — a 
few fanatics were " inclined" to it — a few politicans, who coveted power 
and the plunder of the treasury, were " inclined" to it, and in an evil 
hour succeeded in persuading the extreme North that being "inclined," 
a majority of a people may act on their inclinations and put down a 
minority, and make their own of their territory ! 

A single word on a subject on which we hear much from the Re- 
publicans. There is a sign, they think, a sign at least of conservatism, 
which adorns their front, of which they are never done boasting. They 
say they have with them the capital of the country. Gentlemen, 
count the cultivated acres of Pennsylvania, and tell me how many of 
them you find in the hands of the Republicans. Are the farmers and 
landlords Abolitionists? Greenbacks — if you please — value which goes 
up and down with Mr. Chase's thumb — credit — much of the brittle 
establishment called the funds, of which the larger portion is nothing 
but credit — no small part of such capital as that, I grant you, supports the 
Government. To be sure it does. The Government is its master. 
When the precious metals are no more, and the Government is in the 
field spending thousands of paper millions, such capital has but a small 
chance for its virtue and independence. It has a master, and must do 
as it is bid. Its conservatism and propriety are on a par with that of 
many of our Protestant clergy of the United States, who do as they are 
bid too, and adjust their degrees of offence against the doctrine and ex- 
ample of their Divine Master to the exigencies of their earthly master, 
the congregation. They may be right enough — and so may be the 
clergy — to look to their pockets. I do not stop to impeach them for 
it; all I say is, they are not to be counted as a conservative item in the 
great account which we are making up, and have soon to settle. 

Fellow-citizens, credit and the funds are not conservative, they are 
only timid — they truckle to Mr. Lincoln, they eat humble-pie. If they 
had had funds at Rome, as they had not, those funds would not have 
sold, as you know land did, at a fair market price, when Hannibal lay 
before the town — they would have capitulated or run down to nothing. 
Gentlemen of capital, look out for your capital. Your time will go by. 
The sibyl will not always return to your door. The Government — the 
Administration we call it — which you subscribe for and support, is re- 
volution, and nothing but the coming into power of the Democratic 
party can save you from the fifth act of a revolution. Look to that — 
there is the danger for your property — the danger of anarchy. If prop- 



PAETY CONSERVATISM. 337 

erty lays to its soul the unction that the worst which can come of all 
this is a strong Government to take care of it, it commits a fatal error. 
It will be many a generation before a strong Government is seen in 
North America, before this country submits to a master, before we can 
be satisfied we are not born to be free. What we shall come to, if this 
thing is pushed, is mob-rule, which will sack and destroy property. 
We may go to that point by the way of tyranny, but there will be a 
very short reign of it indeed, and the end, an end soon arrived at, will 
be universal confusion. It is a prodigious mistake to say that what the 
courtry has submitted to during the past two years proves their pusil- 
lanimity, proves they will yield their necks to the yoke, that they are 
ready to be slaves. Gentlemen, posterity will say of these events, now 
passing before your eyes, when they come to be reviewed, that they 
prove not the low but the high qualities of the people — that unlike tin- 
populations of Europe, who have no election day, who know no remedy 
for oppression but to rise in insurrection, we stood by the law ; that, 
conscious we were free, we waited for the ballot-box ; waited till we 
could come by power in the due course of organized policy. We have 
no starving population to make mobs ; uo men of broken fortunes to 
lead them, and nothing but some sudden, and not to be looked for, out- 
break of popular resentment can bring us to resistance, until all hope is 
past of redress through the law; through the Constitution; through the 
regular and prescribed course of the institutions of the country. But 
when the day comes — if it be coming — svhen the Government in this 
North of ours attempts to set aside the ballot-box, and substitute for it 
their own arbitrary will, the day of revolution consummate has arrived. 
When the citizen finds his way to the polls obstructed by physical force, 
he will achieve his rights on the spot. Did he fail in that, he would be 
a slave forever, and deserve to be. 

A word now, if I am not making too great a draft on your patience, 
on another point of conservatism — I mean the violent and unconserva- 
tive manner in which the war of party, not usually a war to the knife — 
is carried on against us. The Abolition party hate slaveholders. It is 
their first commandment, but they are not face to face with them. The 
Democrats they meet in the market-place ; we cross their paths, and 
infect their air, and indemnifying themselves for it as they do with in- 
dulgence in a fraternal hate and a daily increasing appetite for fraternal 
discord, they are paving the way for possibilities, which, being the mi- 
nority, an ascertained minority at the polls — they had better avoid if 
they can. What have we done to incur this most unconservative dis- 
like ? More than half the country, too many millions of persons to be 
acting under delusion, backed by distinguished statesmen, and sup- 
22 



338 CHARLES LTSTGERSOLL. 

ported by the solemn judgments of courts of justice, insist that the 
Federal Administration has set aside the Constitution. That they think 
so, no man in Ins senses can doubt. Now, under these circumstances 
it is that the Democratic party seeks, in regular course of constitutional 
opposition, to put them out. We propose to vote them out. What 
else? Nothing! And I may add that our language, the language of 
our press — what is left of it — and of our speakers, in and out of Con- 
gress, is rarely immoderate. I ask the question whether the opposition 
to Mr. Buchanan, the opposition to Mr. Pierce, and' so up the line of 
Presidents to Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson, was not more violent, 
more abusive, more unsparing, than our opposition to Mr. Lincoln ? I 
believe no Republican will lay his hand on his heart and deny it. If 
this be so, then the supporters of the Administration must needs be, to 
the last degree, culpable in their mode of dealing with us. 

The language that is applied to us, the threats which are uttered 
against us — if we can believe our eyes and ears, and trust them — the 
information, the authentic information, which reaches us from all sides, 
can be construed only into a purpose on the part of too many of the 
supporters of this Administration not to meet us fairly, party against 
party, not to outvote us, not to gain elections over us, not to deal with 
us in the fair course of political controversy, but to strike bodily terror 
in us, if they can, and if they cannot do that, to prevail against us by 
physical force. 

Gentlemen, if I know any thing of the purposes and proposed move- 
ments of the Democratic party, what they most would avoid is personal 
conflict, what they most desire is to adhere to the organized action of 
their institutions. What they fear is the invasion of those institutions 
and the total destruction of their capacity for organized action by a re- 
sort to brute power. Now, this is a meeting in a ward, one of twenty- 
five wards, which, all put together, make but a single town ; but I take 
the opportunity, from this humble stage of an obscure theatre, to bring 
it to the attention of the Republican party that, considering the rela- 
tions between us, I mean considering that they are the minority, and we 
the majority, their course towards the Democratic party is perilous. If 
they not only think our principles as detestable as we think theirs, but 
if they mean to attempt to crush them out of us as they call it, they had 
better recollect who and what they are, and who and what we are. To 
affront those who are stronger than themselves is imprudent ; but to in- 
sist on pressing the quarrel to extremes is dangerous. They had better 
pause — they had better, if need be, to gather wisdom, go back and 
study the fable that shows the difference between the earthen pot and 
the iron one. 



conscription. 339 

In conclusion, let me say to you, fellow-citizens, follow out to the end 
your conservatism — let our antagonists ruin themselves, but not the 
country. They can violate the law, trample on the Constitution, but 
I think they cannot drive the people past their discretion, and I am 
sure they cannot prevent their changing their rulers at the ballot-box. 
The chances are against them, the chances are with the people. If we 
bear and forbear till the autumn, and then beat the administration at 
the polls — for a fair clear poll we will have at no matter what cost — 
the contest is over — we are safe — we begin a new day — not indeed with 
unclouded skies, on the contrary with the storm all around us ; but 
wrapped in the mantle of our integrity, we shall weather it. 

And should the day come which you and I are struggling to keep 
oft'; when all is confusion ;* when every thing is pulled to pieces, and 
those who now whoop on soldiers to do military execution on free 
speech and free men are flying from infuriated mobs; when they come 
to be the anvil instead of the hammer, and to be the anvil for their own 
hammers, for the mob that pursues them will be a Republican mob, 
a mob of their own victims, instead of seeing these poor men carried to 
the lantern or the block, give, I pray you, Mr. President and gentle- 
men, give as many of them as you can refuge in your cellars. 



CONSCRIPTION. 



Argument before the Judges of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 
in the cane of Kneedler et at. vs. Lancet al. Dec. 30, 1863. 

I desire first, with the permission of the Court, to say a word in 
addition to what my colleague has urged and backed with authorities 
which ought to be irresistible, touching the right of these defendants, 
whoever they may be, to come into Court and move to dissolve this 
injunction — a motion made under circumstances so extraordinary that 
it would be vain to look for precedents to justify it. It concerns not 
my clients alone, but the honor and dignity of the Court that this mo- 
tion be denied a hearing. On the 23d of September last, the motion 
for an injunction — the injunction they now would dissolve — was argued 
before the five judges, the learned judge, before whom the motion was 
made, having requested and obtained the attendance of his four breth- 
ren to hear an application involving a great constitutional question. 
Notice of the day appointed by the Court for the argument was given 
to the counsel who seemed to represent the enrolling officers and the 
interests of the United States, wno had called on us for a copy of our 
bill, and repeatedly communicated with us as representing the same 



340 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

parties for whom now avowedly they appear, and for whom they have 
entered of record an appearance. When the 23d of September — the day 
fixed for the hearing — came, the Court was here, the counsel for the 
plaintiffs were here, but no counsel for the defendants. 

After waiting some time, the learned gentlemen were sent for. The 
return of the messenger was that they were not in town. This was 
strange, considering that the judges had come together from different 
parts of the State at a season of vacation, expressly to hear this case 
and no other. But the interests involved were so important that even 
in the face of what appeared to be a slight, the argument was not suf- 
fered to proceed in the absence of the defendants' counsel until the very 
unusual recourse was had to affidavits. The argument then proceeded, 
the plaintiffs were heard, and the Court adjourned to consider the 
question. On the 9th of November it was decided during the session at 
Pittsburg, each of the five judges delivering a separate and elaborate 
opinion, and the order was for an injunction to restrain the draft in 
each of the cases, three of the learned judges holding the Conscription 
Act to be unconstitutional, and two not. On the seventeenth of this 
month of December, the same learned counsel, who was not in town to 
take part in the argument in September — and it is not pretended but 
that he meant to be absent, that he refused to take part in it — comes in 
and moves to dissolve the injunction. Here, then, was a motion to un- 
do what had been so solemnly done, exactly one month and eight days 
before, supported by no affidavits, pretending to no new facts, no change 
of circumstances, and no reason whatever to this moment offered why 
the Court should take back what they had so lately and so deliberately 
adjudged. Why should these defendants be allowed such a liberty ? 
They say a motion to dissolve is always in order. That is new to us. 
In England, and possibly in others of the States, injunctions are granted 
without hearing, without calling in the party to be enjoined, but with us 
that is not so. By the 53d rule " special injunctions shall be grantable 
only upon due notice to the other party by the Court in term, or by a 
Judge thereof in vacation, after a hearing which may be ex parte if the 
adverse party does not appear at the time and place ordered." Such 
being the practice, motions to dissolve injunctions are not more in 
order than motions to open judgments at common law. You can come 
in, but you must bring with you something to show that something has 
happened to induce the Court to pick out their own work ; otherwise, 
there would be no end to experiments on their justice and trifling with 
their patience. I can make the motion, but can I have a second hear- 
ing ? Can I have a special day assigned and the Court assembled to 
listen to me ? Can I refuse to come in and present my argument at the 



CONSCRIPTION. 341 

time fixed to hear it, and then, when the decision has gone against me, 
say, / will be heard now ? Was such a thing ever done before ? I most 
respectfully and most confidently submit that it has no example. I 
could imagine with a little stretch of imagination that in a matter so 
important to the whole community the Court would not let these inter- 
ests suffer for contumacy of those who issued the order not to defend 
them in September — I say, who issued the order, for no imagination 
could be so lively as to suppose that counsel were not on that occasion 
ordered and directed to forbear to defend this case. If, therefore, in so 
orave a case those who committed so grave a mistake offered to repair 
it, I can understand how the Court should say, we will hear you, the 
public shall not suffer by your default. 

But the way I should suppose to say that, is to. say to them, file your 
answer to the Bill — do that to-day and your case will be entitled to a 
hearing to-morrow. All the defendants have to do, instead of flouting 
us with a motion to dissolve, is to come regularly forward, to have the 
case regularly heard — heard decently and in order. In a case not in- 
volving a single disputed fact, it is plain they obtain speedier justice if 
the object be to avoid delay, than they can have through this motion. 
They actually retard justice by the course they take. They can get by 
this course only an unction fur their pride at the expense of tin' dignity 
of the Court. But have they done nothing to forfeit their right, if they 
ever had it ? 

They have, indeed ; not only they refused to avail themselves of 
their opportunity last September, to show the constitutionality of this 
law — not only did they purposely and contemptuously reject it, but 
when the argument went on without them, and the case was decided 
against them, what did they do? Why, having despised to argue the 
question in September, and the injunctions being ordered in Novem- 
ber, they go on in December and stick their bills all over town, and 
on the very Court-House walls, in pursuance of a law which the Court 
had just declared to be unconstitutional. They contemn the Court, 
they act in derision of it. These are the circumstances under which 
this argument is to go on. As you have said we must go on and 
argue both questions together, the question of order and the other, I 
thus offer my views on what we regard as the question which the 
Court have to decide before they can reach the merits, and coming to 
the main question I repeat the humble suggestion, that the course of 
the defendants, and of those under whose promptings they act, is an 
affront to the administration of justice, which it concerns the dignity 
of the Court, if not to rebuke, at least not to submit to. 

But enough of this. Let me take up the merits, so soon to be re- 



342 OHAKLES INGERSOLL. 

viewed, of the great question you have just decided. Upon it I shall 
endeavor to satisfy the Court of these positions : First. That the 
power given Congress "to raise and support armies," which is con- 
tended to be an unlimited power, is not so. That while these are 
general words, such as organic law by necessity deals in — for Consti- 
tutions are not like statutes, and cannot go into details — they convey 
by those general words a limited power ; how limited I will show. 
Second. That the power to impose a military conscription, and im- 
press the whole population for military service, like the right to take 
all their possessions, and transfer them to the public chest, is not 
properly a constitutional power at all, is not an engine of regular gov- 
ernment, at least not in this country, but is that ultimate right which 
exists somewhere in every civilized community, to provide for its safety 
in time of extreme need, and that this power, which is the power of 
the parens patriae, with us resides not in the Federal Government, but 
in the States. That the exercise of it, therefore, by Congress is an 
usurpation, in other words, unconstitutional. 

Before coming to the law of the case, I desire to say something on 
its facts. Not the facts set forth in the bill, but certain facts on which, 
as I understand it, the learned Judges, who composed the minority of 
the Court, at the former argument, laid great stress. I mean facts of 
history ; the fact, whether in this country or in England, from which 
we derive so many of our ideas and institutions, there ever has been 
a military conscription, or any thing like it ; whether, for this act 
of Congress, now on its trial, there are precedents in either country. 
Every country, which has lost its liberties, has seen them taken away 
by an army. They are either taken by the army, or being snatched 
by a tyrant in the midst of civil confusion, his army has enabled him 
to keep and hold them. It is not necessary he should be a Caesar. 
He may be a blunderer and do it. Any government, with a Constitu- 
tional power of conscription, an unlimited right to raise armies by 
force, is on the road to tyranny, and the question what the precedents 
are, therefore, is an interesting one. 

I do not mean the militia. Those are precedents of a kind of con- 
scription, which I do not mean to quarrel with. That is not raising 
and supporting armies. The State power to call out the militia, and 
compel their service, is a Constitutional power, no doubt, in all the 
States, as it is in Pennsylvania, and the Federal power over them is 
defined by the Constitution of the United States. I will assume, for 
the sake of argument, without otherwise conceding the point, that the 
right of the Federal Government, under the fifteenth power of Con- 
gress " to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of 



conscription. 343 

the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions," is a right 
superior to that of the States. That although they are a State force, 
V the militia of the several States," as they are called in another part 
of the Constitution, they can he taken out of the hands of the States 
in the cases mentioned in the fifteenth power of Congress. Militia 
are not recruited, they are drafted ; their service is compulsory, 
and has been since the days of Alfred. Regular armies, so we say, 
are recruited, not drafted ; their service is voluntary, not compulsory. 
"When the Constitution of the United. States gives to the Federal 
Government power over the State militia, they give them compulsory 
power by the unmistakable language of the Constitution ; for when 
they say militia, they speak of a force which serves in no other way 
than under draft; when they say raise and support arm its, they 
mean what are called regular armies, as contradistinguished from mili- 
tia, and the question arises, do they mean regular armies, raised not 
only by recruiting, but compulsorily, too. The militia are the antago- 
nist muscle to the army. No militia ever was dangerous to liberty ; 
they are among the pillars of liberty. The militia are not, like regu- 
lar armies, a separate establishment, they are the people themselves. 
To compel militia service, and to compel service in the regular army, 
are not only not the same thing, but they are, so far as liberty is con- 
cerned, the very opposite of one another. They were so regarded in 
the Convention which framed the Constitution, and by all the State 
Conventions which debated it. Everybody familiar with them knows 
that. It must always, too, be borne in mind, in speaking of drafting, 
even for regular troops, under the Confederacy, if any such drafting 
there was, that regular troops then were on the militia basis in this 
all-important particular, that they were officered by the State up to 
the rank of Colonel inclusive. Congress appointed no officer under 
the rank of Brigadier-General. The danger in a conscription is of 
tyranny, which ceases to exist, as soon as you give to thirteen or 
thirty-four different States the appointment of regimental officers. 
This State power might damage or subserve discipline. I say 
nothing of that, but an army influenced from thirty centres, is, as 
an instrument of tyranny, very different from an army influenced from 
one. 

If it were necessary to insist on the difference between a conscrip- 
tion in the time of the Confederacy and in the time of the Consti- 
tution, it might be carried out to any length. The troops of the 
Confederacy were paid by the States, not by Congress ; each State 
paying its own men. Nor could Congress exercise any of their more 
important functions, among the rest requisitions on the States for 



344 CHAIiLES INGEESOLL. 

troops and money, without the consent of nine States, so that in effect 
the States were masters of the Congress, army, and all. 

I proceed to the supposed precedents, the question being whether 
in them we find what will warrant this military conscription, attempted 
under the act of Congress of the 3d of March, 1863. 

I begin with what is called General Knox's plan, to be found on 
page 2088, and the twenty following pages of the Appendix to the 
Second Volume of Gales and Seaton's Congressional Debates. Gen- 
eral Knox, who was the first Secretary of War under the Constitu- 
tion, was also at the head of the War Department under the Confede- 
racy, and his plan, so far from being framed with any view to the 
provisions of the Constitution, is declared, in his letter to the Presi- 
dent, to have been first presented by him to the old Congress, before 
the adoption of the Constitution, and therefore referred itself to State 
power altogether, Congress having at that time no power to raise 
armies. This ought to settle it as a precedent ; but it is said to have 
been approved by Washington. This is out of the question if it be 
meant Constitutionally approved, the plan having been drawn up before 
the Constitution existed. 

Washington may have given it more or less military approbation, 
but his message, communicating it to Congress, dated the 21st of Jan- 
uary, 1790, which will be found on .page 1076, of the preceding, or 
first volume of the debates, studiously avoids even that. The whole 
message reads thus : 

" Gentlemen of the Senate and Rouse of Representatives: 

" The Secretary of the Department of War has submitted to me certain prin- 
ciples, to serve as a plan for the general arrangement of the militia of the United 
States. Conceiving the subject to be of the highest importance to the welfare of 
the country, and liable to be placed in various points of view, I directed him to lay 
the plan before Congress, for their information, in order that they may make such 
use thereof as they may judge proper. Geo. Washington. 

"January 21st, 1790." 

General Knox, therefore, was left to his own merits, altogether, though 
it is true, he says in his communication to the President of the 18th of 
January, 1790, that he "had approved the general principles thereof 
with certain exceptions," and that jbe had modified his plan according 
to the suggestion of the President, but Washington does not say so. 
What then were his merits ? That is difficult to say, for his scheme set 
out at tedious length, is hardly intelligible. It is a plan for the organi- 
zation of the militia. It is entitled " General Knox's Militia Plan." 
Washington calls it, in his message, " a plan for the general arrangement 
of the militia," and General Knox, in submitting it to Washington, calls 



COXSCKIPTION. 345 

it " a plan for the arrangement of the militia." Accordingly, it is de- 
veloped by its projector in his voluminous puper as a militia plan for 
exercising all the youth of the country in military life during a few days 
of each year, in a manner which he describes and recommends. With 
the militia project he seems to mix (whether he does or not I leave to 
those whose study of the paper has been more successful than my own, 
though I have taken much pains to understand it), what has been sup- 
posed to be a scheme for supplying an army by taking men from the 
different militia corps. But he does not say there is to be any com- 
pulsory draft of them, any forced service, which is the only point of 
interest to-day. I quote all lie says which appears to go to that point : 
He says, at page 2093, " all requisitions of men to form an army, either 
for State or Federal purposes, shall be furnished" from the militia organi- 
zation ; and this is the first announcement of what is now thought to 
be General Knox's germ of a conscription. Further on, at page 2094, 
he says : " The men who may be drafted, shall not serve more than 
three years at one time." From these two phrases we are left to infer 
that in the militia, we were to find a regular army ; but in the whole 
paper we see nothing of forced service. The call might be for volun- 
teers, or might be satisfied by a small fine. Let counsel put their finger 
upon any thing more in all this labyrinth of matter. In short it may be 
said of General Knox's plan, that nothing approaching or resembling 
the present scheme is to be found in it. 

Whatever it was, it does not seem to have had the active sanction of 
any one man in the whole country. Congress organized the militia, 
after much debate, which is to be seen in Gales and Scaton, by the act 
of 8th May, 1792. Not a feature of General Knox's plan was adopted ; 
I do not perceive that one single word was bestowed on it. His views 
were not so much as referred to or mentioned on the floor of Congress. 
Congress no more than Washington, sanctioned them. Washington 
said that the subject of militia " was of the highest importance to 
the welfare of the country," and " liable to be placed in various points 
of view," he therefore directed General Knox's militia plan to be 
laid before Congress "to make such use thereof as they may judge 
proper," and Congress thought proper to make no use of it at all. 
So let it rest. 

A contemporaneous fact with that of General Knox's scheme, and 
which like that is really nothing but a militia fact, has been used against 
us. It is said that Rhode Island in coming into the Union proposed 
an amendment of the Constitution to the effect " that no person shall 
be compelled to do military duty, othorwise than by voluntary enlist- 
ment, except in cases of general invasion, any thing in the second para- 



346 CHAKLES IISTGEIISOLL. 

graph of the sixth article of the Constitution, or any law made under 
the Constitution, to the contrary notwithstanding." And what does 
this mean ? Surely not that the people of Rhode Island thought Con- 
gress could constitutionally raise soldiers by force. It appears to de- 
monstration in every debate in every convention, State and Federal, and 
cvcrv out-door discussion which took place^while the Constitution was 
before the country, that no being in those days ever imagined compul- 
sion to be in the Constitution as a mode of raising armies. That, I 
say, is demonstrated by the fact that the fiercest and most ingenious op- 
position was made to giving Congress any army-raising power at all, as 
being dangerous to the citizen, and yet nobody saw in it, forsooth, the 
greatest danger of all. Had it been seen, the Constitution could not 
have received the vote of one State of the thirteen. They wished to 
leave the power to raise armies with the States, or limit it to time of 
war, or to a certain force only. But a conscription ! Nobody thought 
of such a thing. It is like the discovery of the President's right to suspend 
the habeas corpus. Both were discoveries made seventy-five years after 
the fact, after the world had been all that time unanimous to the con- 
trary. Thirteen States held each a convention, and debated the pro- 
posed Constitution. Their debates are extant, many of them, those of 
Virginia alone occupying a thick octavo volume. Opposition to the 
Constitution ran high. The North Carolina Convention rejected it. 
Rhode Island, at first, would not call a convention to consider it. New 
York was as near rejecting it as possible. In Massachusetts and Vir- 
ginia the vote was close. In the Federal Convention some members 
refused to put their names to the draught, and others retired altogether. 
The Federalist appeared. The press of the country teemed with the 
conflicting views of the people of the States, the main difficulty every- 
where being, as Patrick Henry expressed it, that Congress had both 
sword and purse, and it was more than consisted with the independence 
and safety of the States, yet nowhere did the statesman arise and utter 
the one word which would have given him instant triumph — the word 
military conscription^ No, the objection was to giving Congress power 
to recruit an army, to raise one at all. Into the recesses where lay the 
conscription power, ingenuity never penetrated — even the eloquence of 
Henry never flashed. What, then, did the people of Rhode Island 
mean by this proposal of theirs ? Simply that they did not think they 
ought to be compelled to do militia service as General Knox thought, 
and most men thought they ought whenever called on. They thought 
it ought to be only in the case of an invasion. In all others, they 
thought " no person should be compelled to do military duty otherwise 
than by voluntary enlistment ;" and hence their proposed amendment. 



CONSCRIPTION. 347 

Little did they think of more. They were against — as appears by 
another of their proposed amendments, the twelfth — any standing army 
at all in time of peace. They proposed an amendment to that effect. 

I take up the English precedents. What are they ? They are ad- 
mitted to be no more than the statutes of the beginning and middle 
of the last century, by which Parliament seized on beggars and vaga- 
bonds of various kinds, whom they were, and yet are, in the habit of 
committing to work-houses, and put them into the army ! Can it be 
imagined that this is a case in point ? Only conceive a bill introduced 
into Parliament to-day for carrying off the able-bodied Englishmen be- 
tween the ages of twenty and forty-five, including the judges of the 
Courts of law and equity, and making common soldiers of them, and the 
ministry of the Crown justifying it under these, aristocratic and almost 
forgotten efforts of a century ago to force into the ranks, instead of put- 
ting in jail, the dregs of their population. Yet this is the whole story. 
Go back about one hundred years more, to the days of Queen Elizabeth 
and her father, and we will find these same persons, who more recently 
were punished by being drafted, branded by act of Parliament and sold 
for a term of years for the first offence — which was begging alms, just 
as it was in the statutes cited in the time of Queen Anne and her suc- 
cessors — branded and sold for life for the second offence, and put to 
death for the third. But are these to be considered as part of the 
English Constitution, or even of their laws, which they are less than 
ashamed of now ? I go for the answer to a note to page 212 of Hal- 
lam's Constitutional History, seventh edition, volume 3. "A bill was 
attempted in 1704 to recruit the army by a forced conscription of men 
from each parish, but laid aside as unconstitutional. Boyer's Pieign of 
Queen Anne, p. 123. It was tried again in 1707 with like success, p. 
319. But it was resolved instead to bring in a bill for raising a suffi- 
cient number of troops out of such persons as have no lawful calling or 
employment. Stat. 4 Anne, c. 10, Pari. Hist, 335. The parish officers 
were thus enabled to press men for the land service ; a method hardly 
more unconstitutional than the former and liable to enormous abuses. 
The act was temporary, but renewed several times during the war. It 
was afterwards revived in 1757 (30 Geo. II., c. 8), but never, I believe, 
on any late occasion." 

I do not know that among English Constitutional writers, I could 
offer to the Court more judicious authority than Mr. Hallam. Occa- 
sional outrages do not make rules of constitutional law. In England 
armies were raised constitutionally by recruiting, and when the people 
gave Congress the power to raise armies, they meant the constitutional 
rule, and not the unconstitutional exception. But the best answer to 



348 CHAELES INGEESOLL. 

these exceptional facts, and one which seems to he altogether conclusive, 
is found in the very next of the powers of Congress to the army-raising 
power — I mean the thirteenth — " the power to provide and maintain a 
navy." It is said that the framers of our Constitution were familiar 
with these British statutes, which I beg to doubt, for they have to be 
looked for and rooted out from among its dust and rubbish ; and no 
man, for a moment, could have thought of them as precedents of Eng- 
lish constitutional law. But, beyond all question, they were familiar 
with British impressment. That was a fact familiar enough to them. 
Why then is it not urged that by the thirteenth power, "to provide and 
maintain a navy," Congress was armed with the right to send out a 
press-gang to find sailors for our ships of war? Why is not the argu- 
ment, " Oh, yes, Washington knew the British navy was thus manned ; 
Madison knew it; Franklin knew it; they all knew it; it was familiar 
to them," — how then deny that power " to provide and maintain a 
navy," excludes the very means they were most familiar with ? I will 
give the reason. It is because while a press-gang, which pressed for 
the most part sailors only, would be infinitely less abominable in itself, 
and quite as constitutional as this conscription, which takes everybody, 
yet the country stands pledged against it. We went to war against it. 
We have denounced it in every way ; at every stage of our national 
existence, from the presidency of Washington to the peace of Ghent. 
It has been the subject of too many speeches in Congress, too many 
State papers. It is too late to talk of its being Constitutional. Hence 
the strange distinction we hear made between an army to be supported 
by a conscription and a navy for which there is no press-gang. But 
let me remind the Court on the point of English precedents of con- 
scription, that if there be one French institution more than all others 
ao-ainst which the writers of England have exercised their wrath and 
dipped their pens in gall, it is that of the conscription. It would be easy 
to find pages of writing by their authors and declamation by their 
orators on this subject, showing not only that they did not know this 
precious fact that a conscription consorted with the English Constitu- 
tion, but exhibiting a national horror and universal detestation of it. 
But I will not do that. I will only quote in evidence of sober English 
opinion a few lines from a publication of a literary character, and reason- 
ably to be supposed as free of mere prejudice as any, I mean the 
British Encyclopaedia. I read from the 8th edition, volume vii., Title 
" Conscription." 

" Conscrijytion, the plan adopted by the French and some other na- 
tions for recruiting their armies. The code de la Conscription forms a 
part of the French system of jurisprudence, and furnishes the most 



CONSCEIPTION. 349 

complete body of regulations for working tin's tremendous engine of 
military depotism. * * * * This system of conscription is no 
doubt a simple and ready means for obtaining the requisite numbers 
of soldiers; and so would a system of confiscation be a ready means for 
obtaining funds for carrying on a war. In fact, the conscription is a 
system of confiscation ; it falls with peculiar hardships upon the poor, 
and upon those of slender fortunes. When dragged from their peace. 
fill pursuits, their prospects in life are often ruined; and whether they 
sacrifice their domestic happiness and join the ranks, or ransom them- 
selves at the expense of their small property, they are equally despoiled 
of their most valued possessions. * * * Were war and conquest 
as in some of the States of antiquity, the great object and business of 
a nation, then it might be advisable to have such an organization as 
would furnish a constant supply to replace the wear and tear of succes- 
sive military campaigns, and the population at large might be treated 
as the materiel for this purpose ; but since civilized nations have learned 
to consider war as an unmitigated evil, to be encountered only when 
every means to avoid it consistent with safety has failed, it is surely 
unwise to have recourse to an organized system of compulsion to force 
a large portion of the population to forsake the arts of peace," &c, &c, 
&c. This, I quote, as a mild form of the expression of English 
opinion on this subject. 

To every word of what Mr. May says in his second volume, page 260, 
as quoted against us of a "forced levy of men for the defence of the 
country," I agree without hesitating. lie speaks of what I have already 
said no man ever denied — the great right of every country to the per- 
sonal service of every citizen when the country needs them for its 
defence. But he does not say that a military conscription is to be 
found in the British Constitution. To tell an Englishman that, would 
surprise him not a little. He might ask the question, on what occasion 
since the conquest of the Island it had been used ? The habits of the 
people of England, like our own, are those of trade and industry; and 
when England is at war, which is not seldom, one of the perplexities 
of the minister is to fill the ranks of the army ; they resort to the very 
discreditable measure of hiring other people's soldiers to fight their 
battles for them. They are more expensive than their own men, and 
necessarily less effective ; but though they have a redundant population 
they cannot get recruits. The constitutional right to impress for the 
land service is one, of which, if it existed, the first lord of the treasury 
would very quickly avail himself. 

I come to the attempt at what is called a conscription, in the war of 
1812. After the capture of Washington, when Congress was in special 



350 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

session, the Chairman of the Military Committee, of the Senate, Mr. 
Giles, of Virginia, by letter dated September 23, 1814 — I read from 
Gales and Seaton, 13th Congress, vol. iii., page 1502 — called on Mr. 
Monroe, the acting Secretary of War, to make known to the Committee 
the defects of the military establishment, and the remedy for them; 
and Mr. Monroe, by a communication dated the 17th of the next month, 
submitted to the Committee what he called a report, by which he in- 
forms them that the army then consisted of 62,448 men; that he 
thought a force of not less than 40,000 men more ought to be added to 
them, to be raised, these are his words: "for the defence of our cities 
and frontiers under an engagement by the Executive with each corps, 
that it shall be employed in that service within certain specified limits;" 
and he goes on to explain how he thought those 40,000 men ought to 
be raised, suggesting four different plans : one was to increase the 
bounties; another to exempt from military service every five men who 
would procure a sixth to serve the war through; another was to divide 
the militia into classes and give the President power to call out any 
portion of any class he should think necessary, to serve two years ; and 
another was the proposal supposed to resemble the gigantic scheme of 
tyranny which this Court has condemned. It was this : here was the 
mode by which Mr. Monroe proposed to get his 40,000 men. Every 
hundred men of fighting age were to furnish four persons to serve 
during the war, and each class, as he called them, of one hundred men 
to be formed " with a view to the equal distribution of property," were 
his words, " among the several classes," that is to say, the system was to 
be such as not to grind the face of the poor only. And where, the Court 
will ask, were the Provost-Marshals ? Mr. Monroe proposed to place the 
drafting power in the hands of either the county courts, or of militia 
officers of the districts, or of persons appointed there for this particu- 
lar purpose. This was the whole of the mild and gentle plan which 
is compared with the ferocious act of the 2d of March, 1863 — 40,000 
men to be raised for a service which I should call a militia service, 
for they were to be raised for the defence of our cities and frontiers, 
under an " engagement by the Executive with each corps, that it 
should be employed in that service within specified limits," and that 
means militia. The militia, a service, which is compulsory, is limited 
in time and place, and this was limited in place but not time. It was 
the proposal to Congress of a most respectable gentleman, who had 
then, however, been in the War Department so short a time, that, as 
he said to Mr. Giles, in a letter dated a few days later than that which I 
have quoted from, his time was too short for him to become acquainted 
with " all its offices." Such was the plan, no more ; but such as it is, 



CONSCEIPTIO]S T . 351 

it is attempted to be saddled upon the great party then in power by 
their enemies who are now in power, as their plan, their scheme, the 
scheme of the party which now opposes a conscription. Now, how 
was that? The Chairman of the Senate Military Committee writes 
immediately to Mr. Monroe that he had not lost a moment in laying 
his letter before the committee ; that they had instructed him to call 
on Mr. Monroe " for an outline of the plan for raising 40,000 men," 
" and particularly how far limitations are proposed to be imposed by 
law upon the President of the United States, in the application of 
that force ;" the committee thus seem to start at any thing that looks 
like mining the Constitution, and demand an explanation from the 
Secretary, who says to them in answer, that he will, for that purpose, 
call in person upon the committee the next day. Mr. (ales replies 
that the committee will be happy to see him, and there ends the 
correspondence. 

But the plan is said to have had the approbation of the Administra- 
tion of that day. Mr. Monroe could not, they say, otherwise have 
sent his communication to the committee. But Mr. Madison, the head 
of the Government, gave it none in his message to Congress, delivered 
the 20th of the preceding month of September : he makes no allusion 
to it. It was a war message at a special session, just after the cap- 
ture of the capital, when the army and the navy, and the means of 
strengthening them, were the only subjects treated in it, and addressed 
to a Congress sitting in the Post-Office building, because there was no 
longer a capitol — their own hall was a smoking ruin. It had been 
burned by the enemy. Was this a moment, if Mr. Madison supposed 
they were constitutionally entitled to make a draft, to hesitate 
to say so, when the armies of Great Britain, relieved by the treaty 
of Paris from their European enemies, were coming in renewed / 
strength against us across the water? It appears to have been, Mr. 
Monroe*<NijHBij,iTBtj who was a military man, and of nobody else con- fV 
nected with the Executive. In the House of Representatives the same 
communication as that to Mr. Giles was made by Mr. Monroe to the 
Military Committee there, of which Mr. Troup was the Chairman. 
Mr. Troup laid it before the House on the 27th October, but does not • 

seem to have reported a bill in accordance with it ; on the contrary, 
bills of a different character were reported, and on the 6th February 
following he gave his reasons for his course, which I read from Gales 
and Seaton, 1129, vol. iii, 13th Congress. After alluding to Mr. Mon- 
roe's proposal, he went on to say that it " had been proposed to Con- 
gress to augment the regular force to 100,000 men, for which purpose 
it was proposed to resort to the most energetic means. It was neces- 



352 CIIAELES INGEESOLL. 

sary for the Committee of this House to endeavor to ascertain the 
opinion of both branches of the Legislature as to the different modes 
of raising men. We did so, and found that no efficacious measure, 
certainly and promptly, to fill the regular army, could be resorted to. 
* * * This being ascertained, other measures were adopted, <fec, 
&c." So spoke the disappointment of Mr. Troup, for he was, as ap- 
pears by the debates, in favor of the scheme. We have, in what he 
said, too, the answer to the suggestion that Congress did not adopt 
Mr. Monroe's scheme, because the peace of Ghent immediately fol- 
lowed and made it unnecessary. It appears, on the contrary, from 
Mr. Troup, indeed from the whole course of what took place in Con- 
gress, about this time, that though the treaty of peace arrived in this 
country, soon after, in the following month of February, no idea of 
what was coming was then entertained. When Mr. Troup canvassed 
the Senate and House for Mr. Monroe's scheme, things were at their 
blackest. But this is not all. Not only was " the opinion of both 
branches of the Legislature" against Mr. Monroe, but their opinion 
of its unconstitutionality was made most strikingly to appear. The 
project in the course of the debate on other bills was seized upon by 
the opposition and violently assailed in both Houses, by some of their 
ablest men. Mr. Mason and others in the Senate, Mr. Webster and 
others in the House, went out of their way to reach the means thus 
of heaping odium on the Administration, then staggering under the 
loss of Washington ; and yet not a man that I can find in either 
House, with the single exception of Mr. Harris, of Tennessee, a mem- 
ber of the lower House, so much as attempted, and his attempt was a 
very ineffectual one, to maintain the constitutionality of the Secretary 
of War's scheme. Some half dozen members declared themselves in 
its favor, and said they regarded it as constitutional ; but where was 
the argument to show it, the course of reasoning to maintain its con- 
stitutionality ? Why was it all left to Mr. Harris ? why was it not only 
not brought forward by the dominant party, but allowed to be shaken 
in their faces as a disgrace to them and their constitutional principles? 
Why was this, when the passage of such a bill, if constitutional, was 
of all other things the most to be desired by them ? I do not think 
it can be shown that six members of Congress, counting them in both 
Houses, declared themselves in favor of the project. I will only add 
that the party and the Administration which now are charged with 
having favored this plan, were in a majority of upwards of thirty 
votes in the House, and a still larger proportional majority in the 
Senate — majorities large enough to have insured the passage of the 
measure in the face of any but constitutional objections. 



CONSCRIPTION. 353 

But the proofs do not rest with the negative. They commit against 
forced service not only Mr. Madison, but the whole executive, Mr. 
Monroe himself included, who seems to have brought forward his plan 
of October, 1814, under pressure of the events of the hour, quite for- 
getting the position he had taken as lately as in April, 1813, only 
eighteen months before. On the 15th of April, 1813, I read from 
Gales and Seaton's, page 1292, 13th Congress, vol. hi., Mr. Monroe, 
as Secretary of State, addressed along dispatch to the American Com- 
missioners, appointed to treat for peace with Great Britain. It is the 
instructions to them of their Government, detailing the terms on 
which they were to treat, and the views of Mr. Madison and his 
constitutional advisers, on the questions at issue between the belli- 
gerents, among others, that of impressment. The English Govern- 
ment, it seems, made a sort of offer to justify their own practice by 
saying that the same was open to us. In answer to this, Mr. Monroe 
says : 

" The remark contained in the declaration of the Prince Regent, that in im- 
pressing British seamen from American vessels, Great Britain exercised no right 
which she was not willing to acknowledge as appertaining equally to the Govern- 
ment of the United States, with respect to American seamen in British merchant 
ships, proves only that the British Government is conscious of the justice of the 
claim, and desirous of giving to it such aid as may be derived from a plausible, 
argument. The semblance of equality, however, in this proposition, which strikes 
at first view, disappears in a fair examination. It is unfair, first, because it is im- 
possible for the United States to take advantage of it. Impressment is not an 
American practice, but utterly repugnant to our Constitution and laws." 

Here we have unequivocal evidence of the views of Mr. Madison on 
forced service in the navy and in the army too, unless, which would be 
difficult to discover, forced service is constitutional in the army and un- 
constitutional in the navy. Mr. Monroe's letter to Mr. Giles, probably 
was seen by -the President before it was in print, but it was not only un- 
necessary that if he thought the scheme not consistent with the Consti- 
tution, he should prevent its going to the committee, but it would have 
been imprudent to suppress it, unpatriotic upon an as yet undebated 
question to keep this letter back from Congress. Congress might 
satisfy him he was wrong; they might reject the scheme themselves, and 
spare him all responsibility; they might pass a conscription bill, and he 
might sign it, constitutionally disapproving it withal, as he signed the 
bill admitting Louisiana into the Union, in 1811. Mr. Monroe's letter 
to Mr. Giles may well have contained no opinions but his own ; but 
his note to the ministers negotiating with Great Britain, could not 
have left Washington without being earnestly and often scanned 
23 



354 CHARLES INGEESOLL. 

by the President and his whole Cabinet, and doubtless other leading 
men of the day, too ; for it was the instructions for one of the most 
important of Executive acts, the responsibility of which was executive 
merely. 

The supposed drafting by the States during the war of the Revolu- 
tion is the last and only one of these precedents remaining to be 
noticed. Two authorities are cited against us, Marshall, in his Life of 
Washington, and Ramsay's History of the United States, if unsupported 
individual averment is to be called authority. What they say is of the 
briefest. It pretends to no detail, and really gives no information. In 
the first place, let me say, whatever happened was at a time when not 
only the States were pushing their lawful authority to its extremest 
limits, but law was really in abeyance. We were in the midst of a 
struggle for the right to make our laws. The Country was unborn or 
at least in the throes of its birth. The only specification by either of 
these two writers, which we have the means of fairly reaching, that of 
our own State, is given by Ramsay as a case of what now would be 
called, I presume, military necessity, notwithstanding that the Constitu- 
tion of Pennsylvania, of September, 1776, distinctly declares that "the 
military should be kept under strict subordination to and governed by 
the civil power." It would be no precedent, nor could be any of the 
revolutionary cases. They may not have been accompanied by a decla- 
ration of martial law, but they happened when the laws were silent. 
How can they be examples of the policy of State ? They happened 
when society was in the condition which precedes the formation of a 
State. It may not have been chaos, but it certainly was before solidi- 
fication had taken place. Nor does it seem to be very logical to argue 
from the fact, if it were so, that the States drafted constitutionally 
when their sovereignty was almost unlimited, that therefore the Federal 
Government may under the Constitution of the United States. But 
what do they tell us was done ? They tell us little or nothing. Nor 
has diligent examination enabled counsel to ascertain that there was really 
any thing to inform us of. Had there been conscriptions they would 
make a great and interesting chapter of our revolutionary annals. 
Everybody would be familiar with it. Conscription is a wound which 
would be sure to leave a scar, yet it has proved impossible to find it or 
any trace of it. This revolutionary drafting was familiar to the framers 
of the Constitution and the people of their day ; that is the allega- 
tion here. Where is the evidence of that ? in what States were troops 
so obtained ? States no doubt called on their counties for so many 
men, and amerced them if they did not provide the soldiers; but let it 
be shown that a conscription law, or that any writer says that a con- 



CONSCRIPTION. 355 

scj'iption law was passed, or not to dispute about words, that any law * t 

was passed, ^V which the man whose personal service was called for, was / '• 
carried off bodily if he did not furnish a substitute or pay a sum of 
money in commutation. It is one thing to fine a man for non-attend- 
ance to render military service, and another to seize his person if he 
does not attend, and compel the service. Do Ramsay or Marshall say 
that any State during the Revolutionary struggle ever went further 
than to raise their quotas of men for the army as they did their militia, 
bv calling them out, and fining them, or their county or district, if they 
did not come. Drafting, which is the word used by the only two authori- 
ties which have been cited, is a word long in familiar use as applied to the 
militia service; they say militia drafts — drafting the militia, meaning the 
system by which they are called for and fined for non-attendance. Was the 
drafting to which Ramsay and Marshall refer, more than that? A militia 
draft or a regular army draft, but with in either case, a fine only for non- 
attendance ? But whatever may have been the legislative enactments, 
whether according to them a simple fine or the actual seizure of the per- 
son, and carrying the man off to camp was the consequence of not 
answering to the draft, did the thing ever happen? Is there any reason 
to believe that the ranks were filled in that way ? — or that a single sol- 
dier was ever added to the army, at any period of the war, from any 
State of the thirteen by forced service? Docs history tell us that? 
Marshall says, "in some instances a draft was t o be used as a last resort." 
Was it used \ were men so procured? Ramsay says, "the deficiencies 
were by the laws of several States to be made up by drafts in lots from 
the militia." Again, was it done? Was it successfully attempted? He 
mentions three States, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. He goes 
on to say, that in Maryland the only consequence of the soldier's not 
being forthcoming was a fine imposed on the county, which was applied 
as bounty to recruits. In Virginia, the language of the historian is too 
vague to tell what the character of the laws was, or what was done under 
them. But the statutes of that State show that in every case of draft 
during the Revolutionary war, with one exception, wdiich was the year, 
I think, 1 777, the payment of a tine saved the drafted man or the dis- 
trict to which he belonged. 

It may have been so in 1777, too. The last case Ramsay cites is that of 
Pennsylvania ; and there we have the means of satisfying ourselves con- 
clusively that Pennsylvania submitted to no conscription. What Ram- 
say says is, that "Pennsylvania concentrated the requisite power in the 
hands of the President, Mr. Reed, and authorized him to decree forth 
the resources of the State under certain limitations, and if necessary, to 
declare martial law over the State." Now here, I say, we know what 



356 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

were the facts. I find in the life of General Reed, published in 1847, a 
letter to him of General Washington's, dated the 4th July, 1780, in 
■which he refers to those powers vested in the President and Council of 
Pennsylvania, and urges that the Pennsylvania line should be filled by 
drafting. The letter is at page 220 of the 2d volume. What was the 
answer, which is at page 225, and is dated the 15th of July, 1780? 
General Reed says: "I pressed this measure last March with all my 
might, but without success;" "the assembly would not venture to pass 
the bill, nor if they had, do I now think it would have been carried into 
execution." I do not say, it would be rash, to make the assertion, that 
fur the army in those days, not a man was obtained on compulsory 
service, but I do say, that after much inquiry into the fact, we can find 
no trace of it remaining ; and I challenge the proof. In conclusion, as 
to the question of precedents of conscriptions, let me say that a conscrip- 
tion, in the sense of this law, of the 8th of March, 1863, I mean as an 
institution or feature of a government not despotic merely, never was 
. imagined # the idea had not birth before the year 1798, ten years after A 
the Constitution <>t' the United States was adopted, and therefore could 
not possibiy have been what has been called familiar to the framers of 
the Constitution. It was one of the vast conceptions of the men who 
carried through the French Revolution. The British Encyclopaedia, of 
which I read the extract, attributes it to Carnot. It is generally thought 
to belong to Jourdan. It became the mode, whoever was the father of 
it, in which the armies of that military people were supplied, and such it 
remains. But as a source of warlike power for a free people, among any 
but a people who ^SBMBfe belongjlo a master, it never before was con- 
ceived in modern times. Anci<en\Rorne has been cited against us. We 
know little more of the social structure of ancient Rome, than we know 
of that of the tribes of Israel, and can safely draw no precedents from 
such quarters. But this we know, that the inhabitants of Rome were 
originally a handful of plunderers, whose sole occupation was inroads 
on their surrounding neighbors, and that this, their early character, was 
changed in after days only in the scale of its operations. They enlarged 
and civilized it ; but it was substantially the same character. What we 
call a conscription, till 1798, was simply the recruiting engine of abso- 
lute governments, to which every thing, either in real or chattel owner- 
ship, belonged. 

One other fact before I leave the question of precedents. This is 
called a conscription, after the French corresponding fact, but we do 
French statesmen injustice if we suppose they have any such hard and 
barbarous enactment on their statute-book as this. Ours is a lottery, 
in which human flesh of all ages to past middle life, is put into the 



eA 



CONSCRIPTION. 3 5*7 

wheel, and any number of times. A man of forty-four is no longer 
young, and may be drawn ; and a man of twenty may be put into the 
wheel twenty-four times before he arrives at the age of forty-four, 
should the Commander-in-Chief be pleased to make so many calls. 
Nor is there a limit to the number of calls on the same person for 
tours of duty. lie may have only returned home, to be again called 
for. He is never free. Now what is the French conscription ? They 
put upon their list their youth between the ages of twenty and twenty- 
one, and none others; and if the man escapes one drawing he is free 
of the conscription for the rest of his life. So, when he serves once, 
he is free for the rest of his life. He is taken for a soldier, if % at all, 
at twenty years, before his ties are formed, before he has entered the 
career of life, and not, as with us, ruthlessly. He serves, it is true, 
in France, fur seven years, but the exemptions with them are numerous 
and humane. Beside persons necessary to the support of parents, or 
of the old or infirm, the married are exempt, and those preparing them- 
selves fur the education of youth, and others not included in our lists. 
But what draws the broad line and makes a gulf of difference between 
us and them, is the fact that if the man is taken, he can be taken but 
once, and then he is taken young, and not in middle life, when he must 
be turn up by the roots. 

Having disposed of the facts. I come to the question of law. Have 
Congress the Constitutional power to institute in this free country a 
military conscription! To sweep into the ranks of the army the un- 
consenting? 

It is said that this army-raising power is an unlimited power in its 
language; and how can we, it is asked, restrain the application of an 
unlimited authority? The position also is taken which is to give force 
to this, that "the powers of the Federal Government are limited in 
number, nut in their nature ;" that the rule that ours is a Government 
of limited powers, "is of value when the inquiry is whether a power 
has been conferred," and nut of value when the question is the inter- 
pretation of a power expressly given; and Gibbons vs. Ogden, the 
steamboat case, is quoted to sustain the position. But Gibbons and 
Ogden was not a case where the question was whether the freedom of 
the people could consist with the uncontrolled exercise of the power. 
To raise armies is a general phrase ; but when you say it is an un- 
limited power, that I deny. 

The first article of the Constitution says that each House of the 
Legislature " may punish its members for disorderly behavior." No 
phrase could be more general, but is the power unlimited? Could 
they punish with death ? Would not any court grant a habeas corpus, 



358 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

if there were such a writ, to bring up the body of a member of Con- 
gress under sentence of death for a breach of order? But in Constan- 
tinople such a sentence would astonish no man ; it would accord with 
their institutions. The difference between a limited and an unlimited 
government, makes the difference between a limited and an unlimited 
power, and makes general mean unlimited there and not here. Organic 
law deals in general terms. Some things only of those which it orders 
and directs can be reduced to certainty. 

The Executive, says the Constitution, can serve only four years under 
one election, — that is a rule which would mean the same thing in all 
countries; but when the paper goes on to say that he is to " take care 
that the laws be faithfully executed," that means one thing or another 
according to the meridian. It would mean unlimited executive power 
in Russia, — it here means that the laws should be carried out by the 
Executive. I venture the position that no general language of the 
Constitution can per se make an unlimited power; and that if the 
language is only general, and the power if not limited is against the 
spirit of our institutions, the rights of the States or the liberty of the 
"" citizen^ the doubt will be resolved against the power. And of this we 
v/ were assured in the strongest terms by Hamilton himself, in his argu- 
ment on Bills of Rights in the Federalist; and if the people had not 
believed him this Constitution never would have been adopted. He 
told them that the Constitution was a Bill of Rights without saying so, 
that all those immunities, which are privileges in other countries, and 
specially bargained for, are a birthright and unquestionable with us — 
that it was not necessary to go them over in order to give color to our 
institutions. Nay, he said, a bill of rights was actually objectionable, 
because perchmce, by its want of fulness, it might throw a doubt on 
what, in the absence of an enumeration of them, was beyond a per- 
adventure. Now I know very well the cry is : Why, a conscription is 
liberty ; it is the very mode of raising soldiers for a free country. That 
is a question to which I will come. All I say now is, that a power of 
Congress in however general language, which interferes with the perfect 
freedom of the citizen or the rights of the States, is not unlimited. It is 
open to interpretation. I say that Congress cannot raise and support 
armies, cannot provide and maintain a navy, cannot lay and collect 
taxes, cannot use any of their powers, cannot even make rules for the 
government of the land and naval forces, or exercise their exclusive 
legislation in the District of Columbia, under the general language in 
which those powers have been granted, in such manner as to warrant 
their being called unlimited powers. So we were told by those who 
framed and offered the Constitution for our acceptance. This gene- 



CONSCRIPTION. 359 

rality of some of its expressions was objected to, and the States hesi- 
tated, but they were reassured by the writers of the Federalist, and other 
good men ; and the argument was, that it was utterly out of the ques- 
tion, that the laws of a perfectly free people — laws which were not im- 
posed on them, which they took upon themselves, and so declared on the 
face of the paper, for the very purpose of guarding and protecting 
them in their better enjoyment of their liberties, — should ever be con- 
strued into the means of tyranny. This same doctrine of unlimited 
powers now taken in ultra-federalism was the weapon of opposition of 
those who originally opposed the federal compact. They said these 
powers were unlimited. The answer then is the answei now — they 
are not unlimited. When Hamilton, as quoted by the learned Judge, 
urges in one of the numbers of the Federalist the adoption of a Con- 
stitution, with an army-raising power without limitation, he meant, as 
the text shows, without the limitations proposed at that day by those 
who thought Congress ought not to have more power than the old 
Congress had to raise armies — that they ought to be limited, at all 
events, to raise armies only in time of war, or to a certain numerical 

force. He was the same man who, in the same papers, joi 1 with 

Mr. Madison and Mr. Jay in giving all these assurances, then deemed 
so sweeping, so satisfactory, and so unequivocal. The very atmos- 
phere of the Constitution, these men told us, was freedom. The 
Constitution was bathed in liberty, and was invulnerable. So we were 
told then ; and iq that way the adoption of the Federal Constitution 
was brought about, whatever they may say now. But let us put this 
doctrine of unlimited power to a very simple test. Let us see how 
many of the powers of Congress will sound to folly under such a lead- 
ing of them. 

I take them up in their order. The first is, " to lay and collect 
taxes, duties, imposts, and excises to pay the debts, and provide for the 
common defence and general welfare of the United States," <fec. How 
shall these taxes be collected ? If the power of collection be un- 
limited, they might be collected with us, as in 1787 they were in many 
parts of Europe, by farmers of the revenue, a species of contractors, 
who, having paid the Government what it was estimated the country 
would yield, were commissioned to go out and get back their money 
with a profit on it, and to effect this were armed with all sorts of high 
powers to trample on the people. Pennsylvania would be given to 
one contractor, New Jersey to another, and they would use their un- 
limited powers as best they might. As to the common defence and 
general welfare clause it is plain enough, from what we hear every 
day, that if those words be read without limitation, there is no pur- 



<?< 






;• 



360 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

pose of power which they would not answer promptly, perfectly, and 
to the absolute ruin of our liberties. The next power — the second — 
is "to borrow money on the credit of the United States." Here I 
repeat the question put in Congress in 1814, does it mean borrowing 
money in the way so common among the nations of the earth, on 
forced loan? If you raise armies by force, why not money? The 
third and fourth I pass. The fifth is to coin money, which, by the 
same unlimited interpretation, already means to coin it out of paper. 
The sixth power provides for the punishment of those counterfeiting 
the coin of the United States. Will any man say that, before the 
amendments of the Constitution, made in 1789-90, by which cruel and 
unusual punishments were forbidden, it would have been constitutional 
to put to the rack a maker of false money, or waste with fire and 
sword his houses and lands ? The seventh power authorized Congress 
." to establish post-offices and post-roads." Unlimited again — a com- 
mon mode of making Government roads at that day, was by making 
the population living at the road side, leave their own work and crack 
stones for the public highways. Could Congress order out the free and 
independent electors to do that ? I pass the eighth and ninth. The 
tenth enables Congress to punish offences committed on the high seas 
and against the law of nations. If their power be unlimited, they 
could punish these offenders by the torture, as they could those who 
counterfeit their coin. 

The eleventh is to declare war. Could they declare war against a 
State ? The twelfth brings us to the power immediately before the 
Court, " to raise and support armies." If this power be unlimited to 
the extent of forced service, Congress may go all lengths. Instead of 
foroing us to service for three years, it might be for ten years, or 
for life, which was the common term of service — being voluntary, 
however — in the British Army at the time our Constitution was 
adopted. Again, if they are unlimited, what Mr. Secretary Stanton 
tells us, by his late report, he has been doing, is all constitutional and 
right. He says he has imposed the conscription on twelve States. 
Does he mean that the rest shall go free ; for the power is not limited 
as the taxing power is, " to be uniform throughout the United 
States ?" Does he mean that the States which submit quietly shall 
be shorn, and the others go unshorn ? Again, the power is to support 
armies as well as raise them. The commonest way to support an 
army is at free quarters, as was observed in Congress in 1814. 
Large portions of the force we have now in the field enjoy more or 
less of this valuable privilege. Can Congress put all on the same 
footing? and, when the Provost-Marshals come among us, can they 



CONSCKIPTIOltf. 361 

issue thei/ requisitions for so much hay for their horses, so much beef 
for their men, and so much gold for themselves ? 

hollowing the army-raising power is the thirteenth, " to provide and 
maintain a navy." I have already said, and need not more than allude 
to it here, that the seamanship between the twelfth and thirteenth 
powers of those who direct the ship of State is marvellous indeed. 
I pass the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth powers. The seventeenth 
authorizes Congress to " exercise exclusive legislation" in any territory 
" not exceeding ten miles square," which may become the seat of 
Government. It used to be contended, when we had an entire Con- 
gress, that citizens of Virginia and Maryland, living in the District of 
Columbia, were constitutionally entitled to the rights of freemen of 
those States. But now, it seems, Congress may exercise exclusive 
legislation in the City of Washington, by establishing there a civil 
despotism, when the military rule at present prevailing is found no 
longer useful. Nay, they would have some encouragement, in the 
latter part of the seventeenth power, for making the military govern- 
ment permanent, for the power proceeding to say that Congress may 
buy, with the consent of the Legislatures of the States in which they 
may be, places on which to establish arsenals, dock-yards, forts, <fcc, 
also declares that they shall " exercise like authority" in the ten 
miles square, as they exercise in the arsenals, dock-yards, and forts. 
As the authority exercised in them is necessarily military, here would 
be, but for the doctrine of the Federalist that we are, after all, a free 
country, some reason for military domination over the capital. It 
may be truly and seriously said that, taking the text of this seven- 
teenth power unaccompanied by the commentary of the Federalist — 
taking it up, and reading it, as the army-raising power has been read, 
by the letter, and refusing to open our senses to more, there is no 
reason at all why the City of Washington should not be governed — 
and that according to the Constitution of the United States — with 
power as arbitrary and unlimited as that which prevails at St. Peters- 
burg. The eighteenth power of Congress, and the last, " to make all 
laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution 
the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution 
in the (Jovcrnment of the United States, or any department or officer 
thereof, " defies commentary, and would serve as well for one form of 
government as another, if we did not always bear in mind that we are 
free, and read our Constitution with the torch of liberty in our hands. 
It would be like the common defence and general welfare clause in the 
first power — an open door to every sort of tyranny — and serve as well 
the purposes of an Asiatic constitution as any other, if we are not en- 



362 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

titled to say when the question comes up what the Constitution means, 
why the Constitution means liberty. Were it not for this, the English 
unwritten Constitution would be nothing, and ours would be little 
more. 

The learned Judge has referred to ancient Rome. Let me respect- 
fully remind him that they had at Rome their Censors, whose office 
was to see that the spirit, the tone, the true meaning of the laws, and 
not the hollow meaning or letter only, was lived up to ; they were, like 
this Court, the most eminent tribunal of the State ; and it has been 
said by the profoundest observers, that on them, more than on any 
other institution, depended the safety of the Roman republic. 

But this idea, that a power of Congress must be unlimited because 
it is conveyed in general terms, is covered by the decision in the Dred 
Scott case in 19th Howard, a case which has been assailed, but not in 
that part of the reasoning and conclusions of the Court, which alone 
affects the question now before this tribunal. Tn that case, it was 
decided that the word territory, in the second clause of the third sec- 
tion of the fourth article of the Constitution, when it is said that Con- 
gress shall make rules and regulations for the territory and other 
property of the United States, notwithstanding the generality of the 
word, which might include all territory of the United States, meant 
only territory which belonged to the States when they passed into the 
Union. That territory meant territory already acquired, and not that 
which we have since obtained. This was a point on which the Court 
differed, a minority of the bench being of the opinion that the word 
included all the territory we have, that acquired since the date of the 
Federal Constitution, as well as that held before ; but I am not aware 
that any of the Judges took such ground as that the word territory 
was not like any other word to be coustrued and understood, that it 
was to be taken as it stood, and without regard to any other considera- 
tion. On the contrary, all the members of the Court agreed that this 
unlimited term might signify only a limited power, and they united in 
looking into history and deducing from it the signification of the term. 
Party violence and malice have exhausted themselves on the case, with- 
out making the discovery that Mr. Justice McLean and Mr. Justice 
Curtis, who were overruled by the rest of the Court, failed in their duty, 
because they did not take simply the position that territory meant all 
territory, because the language was general. Those two learned Judges 
have never, I believe, been reproached by the political party which took 
up their opinions, because, like Mr. Chief-Justice Taney's, their con- 
clusion was that territory might mean either territory already acquired. 
or what was already acquired and what was acquired afterwards, too. 



CONSCRIPTION. 363 

Neither judicial diligence nor party fury found out that the business of 
a Judge was, in reading the Constitution, to read it as the learned 
Judge in New York read the common defence and general welfare 
clause on the legal-tender question. The simplest form of government 
is despotism, and the simplest reading of a sentence is that which 
dismisses reason and looks to syntax only ; but the laws of freemen 
cannot be read in that way. 

" Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules 
and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to 
the United States." This general word territory was brought down 
to the territory we possessed in 1789, and the Court all agreed that 
what it meant was matter of deductions and proof — of the proofs of 
history and the deductions of reason — none of them thought they could 
shut their eyes to such considerations. 

I may now go on further. I take up the direct question before the 
Court — is this act of Congress unconstitutional ? Under the power 
" to raise and support armies," can Congress institute a military con- 
scription ? Can they pass such an act as this of the 3d of March, 
I860? The Court will allow me, first, to ask them to return for a 
moment, the question being the grant of a Constitutional power, and 
consider where we stood before the power, whatever it be, was granted. 
The question is where resides this power to raise armies by conscrip- 
tion, a power which I repeat exists somewhere and must exist. Once, 
certainly, the power was in the several States. It was there when we 
were independent sovereignties. It was there still by the Articles of 
Confederation, under which we went through the war of the Revolu- 
tion, and which we abolished when we came into the present Federal 
compact. Through the Revolutionary war, and down to the organiza- 
tion of the present establishment, Pennsylvania and all the States raised 
armies for themselves. Congress did nothing but command them, and 
commission the officers above the rank of colonel. It did not raise 
them. It could not raise them. But in 1789, the States gave to 
the new Government power to raise and support armies, power to pro- 
vide and maintain a navy, power to lay and collect taxes, to borrow 
money, to coin money, to declare war, and other powers which I need 
not enumerate. But did they give all the money-raising power, all 
the army-raising power, every part of all these powers ? Was none 
left in themselves ? The Constitution answers the question. Some of 
thern they gave entire, and some they did not ; they both gave to the 
Federal Government and retained for themselves power to raise armies, 
power to provide and maintain a navy, power to collect taxes, power 
to borrow money. All the power to coin money they gave to the 



364 CHAELES INGERSOLL. 

Federal Government, and all the power to declare war. The power to 
coin money and declare war could not exist at the same time in the 
two sovereignties and they gave it all. The powers to borrow money 
and lay taxes, to raise armies and navies, not only could subsist in 
both, but it was thought absolutely necessary to State safety that they 
should not be all parted with in favor of the Union. This right of 
the States, as concerns raising troops, was carefully adjusted, for it was 
restricted to time of war. The States cannot raise troops in time of 
peace, unless with consent of Congress. Here then are the two estab- 
lishments, the Union, which has no power which is not expressly granted, 
and the State which has all power not expressly denied, the Constitu- 
tion distinctly stating that, " The powers not delegated to the United 
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are re- 
served to the States respectively, or to the people." The two govern- 
ments have each their army-raising power. They both have it ; the 
State, however, having restricted itself not to use it in time of peace 
without the consent of Congress. In time of war the exercise of the 
power is equally open to both. We might have an army in the field 
to-day, and I will add we ought to have one, for we have been once 
at least within a few months actually invaded. This power then was 
originally in the State alone. From it has been carved out and given 
to the United States the twelfth power of Congress, " to raise and sup- 
port armies," and the question is, whether this is more than a power to 
raise armies in the way in which armies were raised in the colonies, 
in the States, in the mother country, that is, by recruiting. 

But governments have a power beyond that of recruiting ; they are 
parens patrice, and have the right to the personal service, if needed, 
of every citizen, just as they have to his estate and possessions. The 
citizen and all he has may be taken for the service of the. country. 
God forbid the day should ever come when this power is denied or 
questioned. It is a right not only plain but familiar. Where, then, re- 
sides this final right of sovereignty, this right to call for and sacrifice the 
body of the citizen on the altar of the country ? Where can it be but 
in the State, if it has not been expressly given away ? To whom be- 
longs whatever goes to make up what we call Pennsylvania? To 
whom belong its inhabitants, its lands, its waters ? Certainly not to 
the General Government. How did they come by more power over 
our bodies than they have over our estates? If they have not final 
dominion over our houses and chattels, how did they get it over our 
children and ourselves? They can raise armies, they can lay and col- 
lect taxes, for there it is written down in their charter — they may re- 
cruit, they may tax, but when you come to the power of seizing upon 



CONSCRIPTION. 365 

all a man has and putting it into the public exchequer, or upon the 
man himself and carrying him off, they cannot do that, for their power 
is limited ; and the State can, for its power, when not expressly limited, 
is unlimited. The State is our parent, the Union is our partnership, 
it is our Constitution, not our country. In the Federalist, No. 84, is 
the true doctrine put by Hamilton, lie says the Constitution under 
consideration is merely intended to regulate general political interests ; 
it is not intended for the regulation of personal and private concerns. 
This Federal Government is but a " particle of the divided being'' of 
the State — the State still remains, and our bodies and estates, as 
Hamilton says, are in its keeping. Here is the key to the rights of 
the States, and put into our hands by not their best friend or strongest 
advocate. I do not mean that the Federal Government cannot take 
private property for public use, making just compensation, as they do 
when they make a road .or build a bridge ; but' I mean that they can- 
not vote every man to belong to them, that they cannot take their 
possessions and appby* them to meet the public exigences. I see noth- 
ing in the Federal power to raise armies, to lay taxes, to borrow money 
— I see nothing in the nature of the Federal compact, to persuade me 
that the States ever gave away this last control over their citizens. 
But this point has been settled, and by the highest authority. The 
Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly recognized the 
parens patriae right to be in the States — indeed I do not understand 
it has ever been doubted. In Wheeler vs. Smith, 9 Howard, 78, that 
court said : 

" "When this country achieved its independence, the prerogatives of the Crown 
devolved upon the people of the States ; and this power still remains with them, 
except so far as they have delegated a portion of it to the Federal' Government. 
The sovereign will is made known to us by legislative enactment. And to this 
we must look in our judicial action, instead of to the prerogatives of the Crown. 
The State, as a sovereign, is the parens patriae." 

In Fontaine vs. Ravenel, 17 Howard, 384, they repeated this. I 
have said that the militia power is part of the parens patriot power. 
I say again I will admit, for all the purposes of the case before the 
Court, that the militia, so far as called to the field, may be regarded as 
taken away from the States and given over to the Union, to their entire 
temporary exclusion in the three cases provided for in the Consti- 
tution. 

Where, then, do we stand ? The question is, the right of the Fede- 
ral Government to carry off citizens bodily, to make soldiers of them. 
The powers of the country are divided between the Union and the 



366 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

State. The parens patriae power is in the State. Thejpower of re- 
cruiting armies is in both State and Union. And now the question 
remains, out of what power is derived, and where is vested this right 
of conscription ? If it come oat of the parens patriot power, it is in the 
State alone, and the Government of the Union cannot exercise it — 
cannot constitutionally pass this law of the 3d March, 1863. And let 
me say, the learned counsel at this point has much need of his unlimited 
power, for he claims to take a course which, to be taken at all, must 
be unlimited — he claims to use an exhaustive process. His right, he 
says, is to take every man in the country between twenty and forty- 
five under the present law, and all the rest as soon as Congress chooses 
to say so; a right which, to exist, must be undivided and unlimited. 
Now, I want him to tell the Court how he finds his way — by what en- 
trance — at what door he gets in ; and, if he can get in, what room he 
finds there for the exercise of his exhaustive power. The State holds 
an army-raising power, it holds the parens jmtriai power, it holds the 
militia power — which is parcel of it, except so far as the militia power 
has been given away under the fifteenth and sixteenth powers of Con- 
gress. What, then, are these armies, these " national forces," which are 
composed of the entire population of the country ? Under what proviso 
does he take them ? Where does Congress, which is limited to 
eighteen powers, and has no others, get the power to come into Penn- 
sylvania, and empty the State of her people ? We will concede that 
the Federal Government could demand constitutionally every being of 
us as militia-men. That of the militia power we were content to give 
away as much as would authorize United States Provost-Marshals to 
come and take privates in the militia. But they are not doing that. 
If they took them as militia, their term of service would be limited 
and short, their place of service would be limited too, their officers 
would not be appointed at Washington. We would appoint them 
ourselves. Very well ; it is plain that they are not calling forth the 
militia ; that would not suit the purposes of Congress, and it is admitted 
that they are not seizing and carrying off men for any thing less than 
regular troops. They are taking them for three years, and probably 
they will not send them beyond the bounds of the United States ; but 
they will, if they choose. If they can take them at all, they can 
take them to go where they like, and to keep them as long as they 
like — they can take them, as the Russian soldier is taken, for life, and 
to fight in remote parts of the world, in support of some alliance, 
offensive and defensive, as is intimated in the opinion of one of the 
learned Judges. Now, as this cannot be done under the militia power, 
the question is, can it be done under the army-raising power ? I have 



CONSCRIPTION. 



167 



shown that the framers of the Constitution assured the people of the 
States, when they paused on its adoption, that there was no extreme 
power in it; and before I take rny seat I will endeavor to show that 
this supposed right to strip a State of its inhabitants, to take whom 
they like, to turn the magistrates of this high tribunal into common 
soldiers, to carry off every functionary appointed to watch over the 
public safety — always excepting his Excellency the Governor — is ex- 
treme, and must needs be dangerous ; that it is, in one word, a military 
despotism. In the mean time, and without the aid of that considera- 
tion, it is not easy to establish, in the absence of admitted premises, 
whether these five words, to raise and support armies, mean recruiting 
only, or recruiting and other means. Our reason may beat to and fro 
between these two points forever, if the question must be settled 
« priori. But it can be resolved by a process more simple. Here is 
the area of Pennsylvania ; we have such an extent of territory, and so 
many inhabitants, so much food for powder, and so much room for 
Provost-Marshals. The recruiting power — if that be the meaning of 
the words raise and support armies — may be exercised within our 
limits by both the State and the United States ; for both have the 
right to exercise it there, — but how can both exercise it, if it mean 
conscription ? Both cannot have the whole population. The learned 
Judge has told us that, in 1814, Mr. Van Huron introduced a bill, 
which passed into a law of the Legislature of New York, by which an 
army of twelve thousand men were to be raised and made a present to 
the Federal authorities, and that a bill of the same kind, about the 
same time, passed the Senate of Pennsylvania, for raising an army 
which it does not appear they meant to make a present of to anybody. 
Now, if we had passed in February, 1863, a State law, dividing up our 
counties into military districts, and appointed a Provost-Marshal for 
each, with directions to take and carry away the population between 
the ages of twenty and forty-five, could the United States come into 
Pennsylvania a month after — in March, 1863 — with their Provost-Mar- 
shals, too ? The game differs from most games ; it is a game which 
only one can play at. I will assume that Pennsylvania has no better 
right to her own flesh, to the bodies of her own inhabitants, to her 
legislators, her judges, her bishops, priests, and deacons, than the. 
Federal power has ; but her right is as good, I suppose. If the State 
passed the law, therefore, and took the men, surely the Federal authori- 
ties could not take them away from us. And, if the two enactments 
were passed the same day, and it were a race for us, both sets of 
Provost-Marshals starting at the same time, while I can understand 
that the Federal riders would be a little ahead since Congress has 



368 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

taken possession, by what right I do not know, of all our railroads and 
telegraphs, yet our title would be as good as theirs : and I would like 
the learned gentleman to tell me into which army our people would 
have to go. It could hardly be that the first comer bad the right, 
as when, to-day an Englishman, to-morrow a Spaniard, landed on our 
shores, and stretching out his arm and erecting his master's standard, 
called aloud, / take possession of this continent for the King of Spain, 
I take this country back to the Pacific Ocean for the King of England ! 
No, sir ; the central Government can turn us into a militia, but where 
is the power to turn us into regular armies ? I make no point that the 
original power, being with the State, we are not to be told that in case 
of doubt how much we have given away, it would be a strange pre- 
sumption that presumed in favor of a party to whom, however uncer- 
tain the terms of the grant, we never could have meant to part with 
what, being gone, would leave us no State at all ; nothing but the shell 
of one. All I say is, here is a conflict of jurisdiction, and that never 
was meant. Whatever can be wrung out of the five words, read one way 
or read another, if the reading be a collision between State and Federal 
power, that reading must be dropped. We must find some other. 

But we can go further. Not only is it impracticable for the State and 
the Federal Governments both to exercise the army-raising power in 
any other way than by recruiting, but it is certain that it is impracti- 
cable to exercise it by conscription, without trenching on the ultimate 
sovereign power over men and things which statesmen and judges have 
united to tell us never was parted with in favor of the Federal Govern- 
ment. It cannot be done without the aid of the parens patriae power, 
which is the State's, which is not Federal. This is a fact, so to' call it, 
which lies on the surface. It is not insisted that Congress, under the 
taxing power, could pass an act taking from us all our property, or taking 
all their property from the people between twenty and forty-five. They 
can tax but they cannot confiscate. Nobody supposed that, where 
there was no crime the Federal Government could do that. Very well, 
if they cannot take our estates, can they take our bodies ? Let the act 
of 3d March, 1863, be read estate instead of body, and we bring the 
question to its true bearings. The act says, in the preamble and 1st 
section, that, whereas there is an insurrection and rebellion, and 
whereas it is the duty of the Government to put down insurrection 
and rebellion, and whereas a military force is required for the purpose, 
therefore, whatl Why, therefore, they take our bodies and carry them 
off to the war. This is the right they claim. But let the act read 
that whereas there is an insurrection and rebellion, and it is the duty 
of the Government to put them down, and whereas it cannot be done 



conscription-. 369 

without money, therefore we are required to bring all our money and 
put it in the public exchequer. Could they do that ? They claim the 
right to take all a man has. If this was the act would it be constitu- 
tional ? Would not all of us cry out against its unconstitutionality ? 
Would not everybody say this was the exercise of that intimate, ulti- 
mate, final right of sovereignty which is in the State alone ? Would 
not the true and real character of the right attempted to be used be 
plain to the dullest perception ? Would not parens patriae stand un- 
veiled ? Would that be the constitutional exercise of the power to lay 
and collect taxes? Is this, then, the constitutional exercise of the 
power to raise armies ? Or shall we be told that our pockets are more 
sacred than our persons ? That those who can confiscate our bodies 
cannot touch our estates ? This act of Congress, therefore, is uncon- 
stitutional because it passes the bounds of Federal power, and enters 
the field of those reserved rights which remain to the States. The 
conscription is no American institution ; it is alien to our habits, it is 
hateful to the people, it is inconsistent with constitutional law, but the 
right to personal service is another thing, and the day may come when 
the last dollar is wanted for the Treasury, and the last man for the 
ranks. When that day comes we must have them ; but it must be the 
State that takes them ; the State which holds in its hand that authority, 
which is always in reserve, to be exercised when the- safety of the Re- 
public becomes the supreme law. It will never fail to be exercised 
when it ought to be. When divided up among the several States, it is 
not even dangerous, while on the contrary in Federal hands it is wholly 
incompatible with liberty. 

Next, I submit that the law is unconstitutional because these words, 
to raise and support armies, cannot have been used by the framers of 
the Constitution, or understood by the States which adopted it, in a 
sense more indulgent to power than that in which the same language 
would have been understood in England. I submit it is unconstitu- 
tional, inasmuch as the Constitution of the United States, which in 
much of its framework is modelled on English institutions — which is 
written in the English language, by men emancipated but four years 
before from the status of English subjects ; who had made a revolution 
which they declared to be, and really was, made because they had been 
divested of English rights, must be construed at least not below the 
standard of English freedom. It is full of expressions, to understand 
which we refer ourselves to British history. For the meaning of the 
term habeas corpus, as it stands in the Constitution of the United 
States, Chief-Justice Marshall said, in 4 Cranch, 94, he must refer him- 
self to English authority. An American citizen, according to the Con- 
24 



370 CHARLES ESTGERSOLL. 

stitution of the United States, cannot "be deprived of life, liberty, or 
property, without due process of law." The question came up before 
the same Court, what due process of law meant. How did the Court 
resolve it? Why, by turning to the Constitution of England, and the 
laws of the States before the formation of the Union. One of the 
powers of the President is to "grant reprieves and pardons for offences 
against the United States." In 18 Howard, 307, the question came 
up before the same high Court what these words meant, and again they 
turned to the same sources of light. The Constitution of the United 
States is unintelligible without referring ourselves at every turn to the 
Constitution of England. Look at it. What is a convention, trial by 
jury, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of petition, the 
right to keep and bear arms, the right of security against unreasonable 
searches and seizures, what is probable cause, what is being twice put 
in jeopardy, what are cruel and unusual punishments — what are these, 
and, I may say without exaggeration, scores of the provisions of our 
Constitution, without a reference to that of England ? I ask the ques- 
tion where we should be if we could not go to England for the meaning 
of them ? For example, the Constitution of the United States pro- 
vides for amendment of that instrument by conventions. A conven- 
tion means, it has always been supposed, what we have in English 
example, a convention chosen by the people ; but everybody knows 
that there are many other kinds of conventions. And where should 
we be if we were told, " Oh ! your convention is not to be chosen by 
the people, the President will choose it — one-tenth of the people will do : 
they shall choose it — that is enough ?" Would the framers of the Con- 
stitution have ventured to lay their work before us, had it not been 
well understood that the immunities they provided for our liberties 
were in no case of inferior stamp to those of England — that to call a 
convention meant less than the English convention of 1688 — that to 
raise armies meant to raise them as they raise them in Russia ? The 
history of our Revolution is the history of a quarrel for British liber- 
ties, which it was attempted to deprive us of. Persisting, as the 
mother country did, in that attempt, we broke into rebellion, which, 
being successful, was a revolution, and ended in our founding a Re- 
public. The Constitution we made for that republic, unlike that of 
the mother country, was reduced to writing ; that writing, for the 
most part, thanks to our ancestors, plain enough ; but if it be any- 
where in its language doubtful, it is to be construed to mean some- 
thing at least as liberal, at least as free, at least as accommodating to 
the people and unaccommodating to power, as the British Constitu- 
tion — as the British Constitution is in its like feature. What a farce 



CONSCEIPTION. 371 

would be our Revolution, if it brought down our liberties — if it lowered 
us in the scale of freedom ! If there be a clause in our Constitution 
which gives more power than the corresponding provision in England, 
all I can say is that it must be plainly set down: your unlimited power 
must not disguise itself in vague generalities. Where the Ameri- 
can Legislature has more power than that of England we must know 
the reason why. I take it to be conclusive — I so submit it to the 
Court — against the constitutionality of Congress raising an army by 
conscription, that the British Parliament could not do it — there has 
been no time since 1G88 when they could do it; nay, that there 
has been no point of English history at which it ever was done. 

I offer next to the attention of the Court a decision, which, had it 
not been at the former argument unnoticed by the learned judges who 
dissented, I should say covered the case before them, and ruled the un- 
constitutionality of this act of Congress. I mean Murray's Lessee vs. 
The Hoboken Land Company, 18th Howard, 272. In the first Con- 
gress, by a resolution passed in September, 1789, I need not*say there 
were proposed to the States, and that they ratified them in obedience 
to the wishes of the people, ten articles of amendment to the Constitu- 
tion, one of which contains the provision that no person " be deprived 
of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" This court 
is to decide whether the process of Provost-Marshals is due process of 
law. Whether Congress can declare military process due process of 
law ; whether due process of law is not something which Congress can- 
not make and unmake. The case in 18th Howard is this: There is an 
act of Congress of the 15th of May, 1820, entitled "An Act providing 
for the better Organization of the Treasury Department." It provides 
for a lien on the lands of public debtors, and then a sale of them to the 
highest bidder, the Government taking out an execution against them, 
called a warrant of distress. These proceedings are authorized by no 
trial and judgment in a court of law, but by the Solicitor of the Treas- 
ury, who, the act of Congress says, may, having ascertained the default 
on the books of the Treasury, take this summary process. This is 
obviously not due process of law between citizen and citizen ; and the 
Government having taken it against a defaulting collector of the cus- 
toms, and his land being sold under it, the question came up whether a 
title passed by the sale. The question was the constitutionality of 
this distress warrant under the provision that no person shall be de- 
prived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The 
opinion of the Court, which was delivered by Mr. Justice Curtis, lays 
down that this warrant was not judicial process. It was executive 
process; and from that point they consider it. They said "that the 



372 CHAELES INGEESOLL. 

warrant now in question is legal process is not denied. It was issued 
in conformity with an act of Congress, but was it due process of law ? 
The Constitution contains no description of those processes which it 
was intended to allow or forbid. It does not even declare what princi- 
ples are to be applied to ascertain whether it be due process. It is 
manifest that it was not left to the legislative power to enact any pro- 
cess which might be devised. The article is a restraint on the legisla- 
tive as well as on the executive and judicial powers of the Government, 
and cannot be so construed as to leave Congress free to make any pro- 
cess due process of law by its mere will. To what principles, then, are 
we to resort to ascertain whether this process enacted by Congress is 
due process ? To this the answer must be twofold. We must examine 
the Constitution itself to see whether this process be in conflict with 
any of its provisions. If not found to be so, we must look to those 
settled usages and modes of proceeding existing in the common and 
statute law of England before the emigration of our ancestors, and 
which are shown not to have been unsuited to their civil and political 
condition by having been acted on by them after the settlement of this 
country." The Court also says : " The words due process of law were 
undoubtedly intended to convey the same meaning as the words, by the 
law of the land, in Magna Charta. Lord Coke, in his Commentary 
on those words (2 Institute, 50), says they mean due process of law." 
Having thus declared what due process of law must be, and that it was 
not for Congress to say what it was, that the article providing for the 
citizen due process of law was a restraint on Congress as well as on the 
executive and judiciary, and that to find what it was they must look to 
the Constitution itself, and if not found there, then to the law of Eng- 
land as we brought it over with us, and used it here, they proceed to 
inquire, having found nothing in the Constitution, whether in the law 
of England, as adopted by the States, there was any such summary 
proceeding against public defaulters. And they find, appearing, both 
by common and statute law, such process in England and in various 
States of the Union. The opinion occupies some twelve pages, and I 
need not trouble the Court with - the details of its reasoning and investi- 
gation of authorities. Mr. Justice Curtis shows, by books ancient and 
modern, that the practice had prevailed in England for centuries, of 
proceeding against receivers of the revenue by a remedy as short and 
sudden as distress warrants under the act of Congress. He then cites 
statutes to the same effect in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, 
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina, all prior to the adoption 
of the Federal Constitution, and at that date in full force. The Court 
then arrive at their conclusion thus : " Tested by common and statute 



CONSCRIPTION. 373 

law of England prior to the emigration of our ancestors, and by the 
laws of many of the States at the time of the adoption of this amend- 
ment, the proceedings authorized by the act of 1820 cannot be denied 
to be due process of law, when applied to the ascertainment of a 
recovery of balances due to the Government from a collector of the cus- 
toms, unless there exists in the Constitution some other provision which 
restrains Congress from authorizing such proceeding." It was due 
process, because it was sanctioned by the law of the land from which 
we derive our laws, and of the land in which we planted them. 

Now I call for the law to sanction this process of the Provost-Marshals. 
Every invasion of the person or property of the citizen must be by due 
process of law, and no provision of the Constitution of the United 
States can be carried out but in that way. The constitutional prohibi- 
tion is not confined to undue process of the courts of law. The legis- 
lative, the executive, and the judiciary, all have their process, but it 
must be due process or it is unconstitutional. When a citizen is arrested 
by order of one of the Houses of Congress, as has happened many 
times, the question of their power — their process — of the process they 
issue to make the arrest, and afterwards the process by which they 
punish the offence against them, is tested by a course of reasoning ex- 
actly similar to that of Mr. Justice Curtis. The proof of this will be 
found in the debates, reports, and proceedings in the case of General 
Houston, who assaulted Mr. Stanshury, a member of the House of 
Representatives from Ohio; in the case of Mr. Jarvis, who assaulted the 
private secretary of the President when carrying a message to the 
House of Representatives; in the case of individuals, if I mistake not, 
charged with uttering libellous matter against the Legislature, and in 
various cases to be found on the journals at any period of time from 
the organization of the Government to the present day. The process 
was held to be constitutional or unconstitutional, it was due or undue 
process, according to the precedents of our own time, and of that of 
our ancestors. So, I need not say, for the doctrine is there infinitely 
familiar, if the arrest is judicial ; so if it be military. If the question 
were here, what was due process under the provisions of the Constitu- 
tion for calling for the militia, the Provost-Marshal finding no solution 
of the question in the Constitution itself, would show that in England, 
from the time when the Danes threatened King Alfred, and in Pennsyl- 
vania, and in every State of the Union, from their earliest settlements, 
the militia have been called for at the public exigency, and if they did 
not come have been compelled to come. This compulsion they would 
show, by the practice and usage of our race and country, was due 
process of law. But what have they to show that compulsion is due 



374 CIIAELES INGERSOLL. 

process under the provisions of the Constitution for raising armies? 
Let them show us that. Where will they look for it ? Thank God, it 
is nowhere to be found ! There may be one kind of process in judicial 
proceedings, between man and man, another in collecting taxes, another 
in the case of captures by land and water, another when we take private 
property for public use, another in calling forth the militia, another in 
raising armies ; and all may be due process of law and constitutional ; 
each may be capable of being supported as the process of the Solicitor 
of the Treasury was by the Supreme Court; but whichever of them 
cannot be thus reasoned upon is undue, is unconstitutional. For what 
is due process we look to our ancestors, to our liberties, to " the law of 
the land," as handed down from our fathers. 

The Court said, at page 276, "due process of law" is the "legem 
terraf of Magna Charta ; that Coke treated them as convertible. terms; 
and it is remarkable that the second Institute of Coke, to which they 
refer, contains an apt illustration that these words cover military cases 
as well as civil. I read from page 53 : " If a soldier after wages received 
or press money taken, doth absent himself or depart from the king's ser- 
vice, upon the certificate thereof of the captain into the Chancery, 
there lieth a writ to the king's sergeant-at-arms, if the party be vagrant 
and hideth himself, ad capiendum, &c. And this is lex terra? by 
process of law, pro defensione regis et rcgni," &c. 

If counsel ask, how can a conscription be carried through but by 
force, the answer is, he argues in a circle. He assumes the very point 
in question, that he has a right to a conscription. He must, as the 
Constitution is silent, test his right to raise armies in this manner by 
showing that it has been the usage and practice here -and in England ; 
then I admit the Provost-Marshal's force, like that of the Solicitor of 
the Treasury, becomes what in the absence of precedents it would not 
be, " due process of law." It is not the test of constitutionality that 
without these measures armies cannot be raised satisfactorily, or the 
public dues collected. It is the right of Congress to exercise their 
eighteen powers over the citizen, but it is the citizen's corresponding 
right that those powers be exercised in no other way than subject to 
his bill of rights, his right to due process of law, and the others.- 

There is but one more view of this case. The two breakwaters pro- 
vided by our ancestors against the tyranny of majorities, who like any 
other tyrants are capable of any sort of mischief, were the State power 
and the judicial. State power is gone: it has been strangled in the 
Federal embrace. Now let the Court look back, before they decide this 
military question at the condition to which in the absence of constitu- 
tional phlegm we have come ; and then I ask where we will be when 



CONSCRIPTION. 375 

a military conscription gives the power to make this state of things 
permanent; for power never rusts for want of use; if Congress can raise 
armies by conscription at any time, they may do it at all times. The 
Conscription Act makes all able-bodied male citizens of the United 
States, and foreigners having declared their intention to become citizens, 
between the ages of twenty and forty-five years, the national forces, 
and as such they are liable to be called out for military service by the 
President. But how? For it is obvious that stringent measures must 
be resorted to. The country is divided into military districts, with a 
Provost-Marshal at the head of each ; and the Habeas Corpus being sus- 
pended and recourse to civil justice thus cut off, they are authorized, 
having first drawn, in a sort of lottery, those liable to service, to seize 
and hold them till they can be sent forward to take their places in the 
ranks. The power thus given to each Provost-Marshal is despotic, or 
rather the power of the President is despotic, and he divides it up 
among so many deputy despots. To them is not given, by those names, 
legislative and judicial power. They cannot pass laws, hold an orphans' 
court, or try an action of ejectment ; to them is given no right over per- 
sons of nineteen years of age or forty-six. Their right is limited to certain 
persons, and they have no right to touch property. But the right and 
the power are very different things. Tliey have the power to take per- 
sons of nineteen and forty-six and call them twenty and forty-four, 
and no court of justice can review them. If to this Court it were made 
known to-day, that any President/Judge of the State, a man of sixty (J? 
years of age, had been taken off the bench and was in the custody of a 
Provost-Marshal, handcuffed, to be sent off to Louisiana or Hilton Head, 
if he did not redeem himself by making to the Provost-Marshal a deed 
of his farm, you could not interfere. Nay, if it were the wife or daugh- 
ter of the judge, you could not interfere if the Provost-Marshal said the 
woman was a man. This is the right because it is the power. Does 
anybody believe that such a power can fail in the end, and that end 
soon, to become a general despotism ? We are told it is no argument 
against a power that it may be abused. I grant it is not a universal 
argument. But it is a good argument in a free country that it is all 
put into one man's hands. Republican institutions being assumed, it is 
not necessary to argue that power so placed will be abused. Whether 
abused or not, it must not be there. Judicial power is ousted and mili- 
tary power is put in its place, and so with legislative power. What 
laws could the Legislature of Pennsylvania pass which would avail against 
the Provost-Marshal ? He draws a line round his district, and no State 
power can enter, legislative, executive, or judicial, nor any Federal power 
except that of his master, the President. This is not the future, it is the 



376 CIIAELES INGEESOLL. 

present — the notorious present. You see in this very district a notice 
of the Provost-Marshal that anybody who pulls down his bills will be 
dealt with by military law. This is perhaps beginning a little fast, on 
the part of that gentleman, when it is considered that he is one of the 
defendants to these suits, and that*his notice was put up after the Court 
had ordered an injunction against him; but it is no more than justice 
to say that, so his law must be executed at last, if it is to be executed at 
all. There can be no divided empire between civil and military rule, 
between the courts of law and the Provost-Marshal. If the military be 
not in strict subordination to the civil authority, the civil will be 
to the military. That is the meaning of the clause in our Bill of Rights. 
It is the expression of a home truth. If it is in the power of the Presi- 
dent of the United States to point to as many as he pleases of the popu- 
lation of Pennsylvania and say, I withdraw those men from the keep- 
ing of your executive, legislative, and judiciary, and place them under 
the Articles of War, where are your liberties? 

Sir, in the English law books we find much boast of English liberty, 
and well founded. They are a great and free people— great because they 
are free. Without their freedom they would be a very coarse-grained 
population. But when they go on to tell us they were always free, it 
is in their blood, in the Anglo-Saxon blood, as they call it, they are 
boasters and empty ones. Sir, did it never occur to you that the reason 
why the English are free, and the only one, is because they do not keep 
an army among them, because they have not soldiers to keep them 
under? When the feudal clays ended, England being an island, and 
early a naval power, and not in constant fear of invasion, did not set up 
an army. The representative bodies of the Continent of Europe were 
as full of the spirit of encroachment on royal prerogative as ever the 
English parliaments were, and the blood of the Celtic and Romanic 
races is as liberty-loving as the Anglo Saxon ; but, unhappily, every- 
where but in England there have been troops in pay from the time 
when the heads of fiefs ceased to follow the sovereign to the field. They 
were indispensable ; indispensable, that is to say, according to the rules 
of modem policy, to those whose neighbors had only to cross a river or 
a tract of country to invade them. The last English armies kept on 
English soil before Cromwell's day, when the army brought England 
to their feet, were those which fought the wars of the Roses which 
ended with the accession of Henry VII. Henry VIII. did not keep in 
England three hundred soldiers; his children kept almost none; James 
almost none, Charles had almost none, or he would soon have put down 
his Parliament. The Parliament had an army before he had, and with 
it put him down. Down to the time when the civil war between King 



COKSCKIPTION". 377 

Charles and his Parliament brought them one, there was no army in 
England. As soon as the civil war was over, and there was no longer 
army against army, the army trampled down liberty, the people became 
the slaves of Oliver Cromwell, the man who controlled the soldiers. 
Under the two succeeding raonarchs., Charles and James, a small stand- 
ing army had been raised amid the remonstrances of the people, and 
when James attempted the liberties of the kingdom, and the Revolu- 
tion of 1688 was brought on, which firmly established their liberties 
on their present basis, the army refused to fight for him. But why did 
they refuse? It was not that they were unwilling to be led against 
liberty by their officers who, with most of the aristocracy and the whole 
English Church, were for power. They refused because, while, like the 
Church and like the aristocracy, they were willing to fight against 
liberty, like them, they would not support the Catholic religion, as, 
unfortunately for his cause, James wanted them to do. It was not that 
they loved liberty, but they hated the Bishop of Rome. They hated 
the church they had plundered. But for that the army and the Church, 
and the gentry with them, would have gone with the King all lengths, 
and there would have been no Bill of Rights, no change of the succes- 
sion, no such dogma for the British Islands as that power springa 
from the people. The incessant railing of the English opposition, no 
matter what party was in, against standing armies, used to look to us 
here like demagoguism. It was unintelligible. But we understand 
it now. The la^t two years have taught us to understand it. Give 
our own Government this power to raise and support standing armies 
by a conscription, this power for which they are now contending, 
and we shall see in how much stead our Anglo-Saxon blood will 
stand us. England never asked for it, and if we get it, if it become one 
of our institutions, if it be found in our Constitution, another thing will 
be found soon after, which is that we must make our choice between 
military conscriptions and popular elections. The same country cannot 
hold them both. They are inconsistent — where the army is in force, 
the people are not. You cannot vote where there is an array. The 
proof of that lies no further off, than in the State of Delaware. 



378 CHAELES INGERSOLL. 

"TO WHOM IT MAT CONCERN." 

Eleventh Ward Democratic Association, Philadelphia, Sept. 12, 1864. 

Mr. Chairman and Fellow-Citizens : — I propose, as the best use I 
can make of the honor you have done me in inviting me to address you 
this evening, to call your attention to a subject which, though it has 
been much discussed during the last two months, cannot be too often or 
too earnestly pressed upon the attention of the country. I mean the 
late offer of the South at Niagara and the rejection of it by Mr. Lincoln 
in his note To whom it may concern. Let me read that paper to you, 
gentlemen : 

"Executive Mansion, Washington, July 18, 1864. — To whom it may concern: 
Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the 
whole Union and the abandonment of Slavery, and which comes by and with the 
authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States, will 
be received and considered by the Executive Government of the United States, 
and will be met by liberal terms, on substantial and collateral points, and the 
bearer or bearers thereof shall have safe conduct both ways, 

"Abraham Lincoln." 

Here is a refusal of an offer which I will show was an offer to restore 
the Union. Here we have what the people of the United States ought 
to keep constantly before them at this supreme moment of what may 
prove to be the last stage of the Republic, for on your vote in October 
and November, depends our present existence as a free country ; here is 
resolved, by Mr. Lincoln himself, the question on which, as I believe, the 
election is going to turn, the question which of the two contending par- 
ties, now about to poll their votes, is the party which will restore the 
country to Union and peace. No party which is for war at the hazard 
of the Union can obtain the vote of the country, nor can any party 
which for the sake of peace would give up the Union ; and gentlemen 
strange as it would appear to those Republicans who by a course of 
reading of their own newspapers, have become persuaded that Mr. Lin- 
coln alone shows the way to Union, and that we seek what they call 
peace at any price, peace at the price of the recognition of the Southern J 
Confederacy, and no Union at all, I can conscientiously say there 
are not twenty citizens of Pennsylvania — there may not be ten whom I 
have ever heard express such a desire or such doctrine ; and sure I am 
there is not a county in the Commonwealth, or a ward or a township in 
any one of its cities or counties, where a Democratic organization would 
print such a ticket or suffer it to be pasted on their walls. The Demo- 
cratic party of Pennsylvania has, from time to time, met in convention, 
18 



379 

and set forth their principles, and so have meetings in every county; 
and such a thought as the abandonment of the Union has never been 
breathed by one of them. The whole Democratic party of the country 
lately met at Chicago, and you have read their resolutions, you see their 
platform — it is Union, Union at all events, and Union with peace. 
You have the letter of their candidate accepting their resolutions, and 
expressing, in language the most energetic, his determination to preserve 
the Union at all hazards. Such is the record, as it is called, of the 
Democratic party. "What have you on the other side? When Mr. 
Lincoln set off from Springfield on his journey to assume the reins of 
government at Washington, in the winter of 1860-61, what did he 
say? At that time States were preparing to leave the Union, and 
before he was inaugurated six of them had seceded. Did he nail his 
flag to the mast? Gentlemen, he said, in his elegant way, he would 
drive the machine as he found it! That eminent follower and political 
friend of Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Banks, of Massachusetts, whom the Republi- 
can party still delights to honor, was run and elected as their candidate 
for Speaker of the House of Representatives more than seven years ago, 
in 1857 — what did he say? — what was the platform on which he was 
elected I It was his immortal phrase, Let the Union slide. Mr. Wendell 
Phillips, who was very lately, and I presume yet is, a close and influen- 
tial associate of Mr. Lincoln, does not exercise his right of suffrage in 
tin' case of Federal officers, because he will not so much as recognize 
the existence of the Union. Mr. Chase, the late Secretary of the 
Treasury, has been often said, and I never heard of its being denied, 
to have given his judgment at the beginning of the present troubles in 
favor of letting the South go, and dissolving the Union without more 
ado. Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, was long the leader of the 
anti-Union party ; in short, not to multiply facts which are as numerous 
as they are well authenticated and notorious, the active and immediate 
supporters of this Administration, which now asks at your hands a new 
lease of power as a Union party, was for years not only opposed to the 
Union, but scoffers at it, and now under the lead of these very men, 
their means of arriving at Union being, as they tell us, fire and sword, 
and nothing else unless it be confiscation and robbery, the masses of the 
Republican party are called on to put their faith in their candidate as 
the Union candidate. Should we re-elect Mr. Lincoln, when no doubt 
he would do just as he pleased, I have always supposed he would return 
to driving the machine as he found it, to the policy of Mr. Chase, Mr. 
Banks, Mr. Phillips, and the pure Abolitionists, that of ridding them- 
selves of the Slave States altogether, by letting them go. But it is 
plain enough that if the point were settled to make peace and let the 



380 CHAKLES INGEKSOLL. 

Soutli go, the question would remain how they are to 'go, and what 
they are to carry with them ? Look at this for a moment. As soon as 
it is agreed the South are to go, you perceive they become a foreign 
country — in peace our friends, our enemies in war; and we would, of 
course, treat one another from the moment we agreed to part as foreign 
countries always do. Questions would at once arise between us — ques- 
tions of boundaries, the question of the metropolis, the question of the 
mouth of the Mississippi, and other questions not less momentous, and 
our honor as well as our interests would be found to be bound up in them. 
Since the world began, no treaty of peace between contending nations 
ever was made on any other principle for its basis, varied very little 
indeed to meet the ends of mere right and justice, than the power of 
the strong, and the weakness of the weak. Denmark is a case in point 
of this sort, and a very recent one. We are not strong enough to 
conquer the South in Mr. Lincoln's sense, and would not be though the 
wish were gratified of that clerical gentleman who wanted every South- 
ern white man, woman, and child butchered, for the four millions of 
blacks would remain, and they alone would be enough to defy subjuga- 
tion in the sense in which it is now attempted, and in which, if the 
history of mankind is to be believed, it never can succeed ; but that is 
a very different matter from the sort of conquest which influences a 
treaty, that balance of success in war which the more numerous people 
is like t^o have over the less numerous. What must be the conse- 
quence ? Why, we of the North would be entitled to use, and would 
use, though we took for our guide the mildest and most charitable rules 
of the policy of nations, our power, which is two or three to one in 
population and a great deal more than that in wealth and resources over 
the South, to make good our title to an advantageous peace — a peace 
taking as much to ourselves, and leaving as little to the South, as might 
be, and that would be no peace at all, but new and fresh cause of war. 
The South, for the sake of secession, must either put up with being 
stripped of what would be indispensable to their nationality, or they 
must persuade us into a treaty such as no stronger country ever yet 
made with a weaker one. The North, for the sake of their peace, must 
give up, not their Union merely, but other things only next to the 
Union in value. Would either party consent to this ? Of course not ; 
and both parties, after determining to separate for the sake of peace, 
would determine to go on fighting for terms of peace. If we transport, 
in imagination, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Davis to a table in the Department 
of State, and scat them there to make peace and divide the Union, let 
any man ask himself for example, what they would do with the Missis- 
sippi, a river which has its course through nothing but Southern terri- 



381 

tory all the way from the Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico, but the naviga- 
tion of which no Northern man in his senses would for one moment 
think of surrendering, or, what would be as bad, leaving to treaty stipu- 
lation. It now belongs to the United States, as well as to the States 
through which it flows, and to hold it by treaty alone would be to hold 
it by no right at all but the pleasure of the other party, for a treaty 
right is a right abrogated according to the law of nations by the first 
cannon fired at us. What would they do with Chesapeake Bay, through 
which we were attacked by hostile fleets and armies both in the war of 
the Revolution and that of 1812, and which, to make safe against foreign 
aggression, even by a European power, yet more by a Southern Con- 
federacy, we of the North must hold and fortify, and which we can 
neither fortify nor hold without holding at the same time the two States 
of Maryland and Virginia? What would the negotiators of separation 
do with the State of Missouri, a Slave State, and of Southern predilec- 
tions, but lying in the midst of Northern States ? What are to be our 
borders? Which of the parties to this treaty of peace shall have those 
portions of territory now held by Northern arms in the Southern 
States of Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North 
Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana? Would Mr. Lincoln muster his 
Latin and cry p>ossidetis uti ? No man can answer these questions, or 
twenty like them which might be put, and the senseless clamor of the 
followers of this Administration about Democrats who are for peace at 
.10 price, is' fit only to impose on those who are so ignorant as not to 
think at all, or to frighten persons who have been foolish enough to% 
embark their all in Mr. Chase's loans. The doctrine of coercion, as it 
is called, of a State by force of arms, may be right or wrong, sound or 
unsound ; the Federal Convention struck it out of the draft of the Con- 
stitution as laid before them ; Hamilton said, in 1788, in the New York 
Convention, that it was absurd and out of the question ; many men of 
the present day differ with him, but there is no such doctrine at this time 
in question before the country. Does any man suppose that if the Demo- 
cratic party should come into power they will say, on the peace question, 
"Mr. Jefferson Davis, you have so many hundred thousand men under 
arms, and so have we, but we will settle all this business with you on 
State's rights principles and the Resolutions of '98 ?" This might be if 
the millenium overtook us first. If things could go back to 1860, 
abolition in the North, secession in the South, and the question taking 
up arms, we would have the point before us. The point was before 
Mr. Lincoln himself when he delivered his inaugural address, and 
I would say he decided against it-«— perhaps, for through Mr. Lincoln's 
English his meaning does not always shine out as intelligibly as it does 



382 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

in To whom it may concern — you would say he dodged it. But in April, 
1861, the war broke out, and from that time to this month of Septem- 
ber, 1864, the North and South have been at open war, with armies in 
the field of immense numbers, who have fought the bloodiest battles. 
The question of dividing the Union and letting the Southern States 
secede was, before the war began, forty months ago, a practical question 
to be considered and governed according to political doctrine and wise 
policy, if (I leave to you to say how far that is probable) Northern and 
Southern passion could have been subdued and a division of lands and 
goods made as it is between parties to a trading partnership. Such a 
dissolution would have been a peaceful dissolution, the parties taking 
this or that by the same rules which governed them when they sat to- 
gether in Congress and appropriations and distributions of public money 
were made among different parts of our territory. But here is war upon 
us, and if it is not to end in Union, if we are to separate, why we are to 
separate not like partners, but — I was going to say like a band of robbers 
who have quarrelled among themselves — at least, I may say, as the German 
States separated after the Thirty Years' War, keeping and snatching 
from one another what they could, according to the " good old rule," 

" the simple plan 

That they should take who have the power, 
And they should keep who can." 

Let any Republican explain to you how there can be peace without 
Union, how there can be separation without war. Let him do that; 
till then, gentlemen, the question is simply this — shall Mr. Lincoln 
prevail as the Union candidate, when he is doing all he can to post- 
pone Union \ We want peace, for peace is happiness and liberty ; he 
wants war, for war is armies, taxes, and power. If by some miracle 
the war could stop and the country be at peace to-morrow, Mr. Lincoln 
would not get, in November, two States to vote for him. 

I come now, without further preliminary, to the consideration of 
Mr. Lincoln's letter To whom it may concern, the proof, as I regard it 
so clear and strong that no man who looks at it can doubt that, while 
the mass of the Republican party, like ourselves, are for the Union, 
for what better could they ask ? and most of them for peace and 
Union, their leaders, the controlling spirits of this Administration, 
are against any peace or any Union which, in restoring the Constitu- 
tion, will bring back the Southern States to vote the Democratic 
ticket, and banish to an exile, worse than the Dry Tortugas, the men 
who have brought us to where we are to-day. Gentlemen, on the 1 2th 
July, 1864, came to the Clifton House, on the Canada side of the 



"TO WHOM IT MAT CONCEEIST." 383 

River Niagara, Mr. Clay, of Alabama, a highly respectable man, and 
when he was a Senator of the United States, on terms of close politi- 
cal intimacy with Mr. Jefferson Davis, and now a Senator of the 
Southern Confederacy ; and with him came Mr. Holcombe, of Virginia, 
lately, I understand, a professor in a college or university, and now 
a Eepresentative in the Southern Congress. These gentlemen pre- 
sented themselves to Mr. Greeley, a well-known friend of Mr. Lincoln, 
and Mr. Hay, his private Secretary, representing themselves to be, 
though not yet accredited ministers, persons in whose favor creden- 
tials to negotiate for peace would be furnished the moment they were 
informed from Washington that they were under safe conduct to pro- 
ceed thither to enter upon their negotiation, and thence to Richmond, 
where necessarily they must report their proceedings. What had 
passed between them and Mr. Greeley and Mr. Hay before the 12th 
July, does not formally appear, though its character may easily be in- 
ferred from what Mr. Greeley said in his newspaper, that peace was 
not as far of as people supposed ; but from the 12th July, to the rup- 
ture of all intercourse (the 18th July) by the note To whom it may 
concern, we have in writing what was said and done in eight letters 
which were exchanged among the parties. You will remember that 
Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe, though not yet invested with the dignity 
of ambassadors, were acting under the full responsibility of a function 
nearly approaching to that, and what they said and did, and especially 
what they put into writing, must be regarded by us and is entitled to 
be treated with the same consideration which we would give to the 
diplomatic notes or movements of J\Ir. Dayton or Mr. Adams, our 
ministers in Paris and London. Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe are, as 
individuals, as respectable as they, and their mission a thousand times 
more important. The envoys were beyond suspicion, their errand 
was the blessed errand of peace. So far is plain. But peace how, 
you will ask ? Was it peace and Union ? 

The terms of peace had not been, we are to suppose, formally de- 
clared to Mr. Greeley and Mr. Hay, though from Mr. Greeley we seem 
to learn they were signified to them, for Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe, 
as yet, held no commission, but they had felt authorized to say, and 
did say in writing — I quote from their first letter to Mr. Greeley as 
much as this — that they were in the " confidential employment" of 
their Government ; that they were " entirely familiar with its wishes 
and opinions" on the subject of " propositions looking to the establish- 
ment of peace ;" that they or other persons on the safe condnct which 
they asked being furnished, would be immediately sent to Washington 
on the errand of peace, and in their note written after the To whom it 



384 CHAELES ETOEESOLL. 

may concern, they declare emphatically that the peace to be proposed 
was " a peace mutually just, honorable, and advantageous to the North 
and to the South." Mark the words, " mutually just, honorable, and 
advantageous." If these two men understood their native tongue when 
they used these words, and if they were not like ambassadors of two 
hundred years ago, whose office sometimes was to deal in nothing but 
falsehood, their peace w r as peace and reconstruction. Peace to be 
mutually just, honorable, and advantageous, could not be peace by which 
the North surrendered the whole object with which the war was begun. 
Nothing could be more false than an assertion that such a peace could 
be just to the North, or honorable to the North, or advantageous to 
the North. Be State rights and the right of secession what they may, 
such a peace, after three years of flagrant war, would be disgraceful to 
the North, and ruinous to the whole country, North and South, too. 
The language used by Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe, could have no 
application to such a peace. If they so used it, they dealt in the 
meanest fraud, in direct and deliberate falsehood. That is improbable, 
but that is not all. The proof what the object of these gentlemen was, 
the proof of what they meant by what they said, the proof that Mr. Lin- 
coln is against the Union, the proof that he rejected overtures for peace 
and the restoration of the Union, does not rest on the solution of the 
meaning of words, or the frailer tenure of the integrity of individuals. 
It rests on evidence of the highest kind, and which in courts of justice, 
as well as in the whole business of life, is everywhere regarded as per- 
fect, because it is evidence which cannot deceive. If you have the oath 
of a witness to a fact, no matter who he be, you may be deceived — he 
may himself be deceived, or he may be deceiving you ; but tell me 
which way that man's interests lie, and I will tell you what the fact is. 
I will construe his words by the drift of his interests. I will presume 
that he follows the rule of the human heart and does not by his words 
betray his interests. If these persons asked to go to Washington to 
treat for peace, that peace could not be peace and separation, because to 
offer such terms at this juncture would be contrary to the interests of 
the South to such a degree as to make it incredible that so extreme an 
indiscretion was committed by persons having the control of great con- 
cerns. Here is the Presidential election approaching, and the North 
is divided between two parties — one for the immediate putting down 
of the South by force of arms, the emancipation of their slaves, and the 
pursuit against their whole population of measures of military rigor, 
and, so they say, to get the Union back ; the other for pausing in our 
hostilities and calling on the South to go into consultation with us, in 
order to an amicable adjustment of our difficulties, and so restore the 



"TO WHOM IT MAT CONCEEN." 385 

Union. Does anybody doubt that in the South they must look anxiously 
to the success, at this election, of the Democratic ticket ? I suppose 
not; I suppose no man's logic could lead him to such a conclusion as 
that the South would send Air. Clay and Mr. Ilolcombe to Washington, 
to insist on terms of peace, which, as soon as the country came to hear 
of them, would settle in the way in which such news must settle in one 
moment the question between the contending parties in the North, for 
where would the party be whose programme is an amicable settlement, 
in order to the Union, when the South, through the mouth of their am- 
bassadors, had solemnly said they would make no amicable settlement, 
they never would reunite with us at all ; all that Mr. Lincoln would have 
to do would be to publish to the world the Southern offer, and there 
would be an end of the question which divides the North. If the 
way to restore the Union is not negotiation, our doctrine is false 
doctrine. To go to Washington to offer separation would have been 
too great a mistake, and there is nothing left to believe but that those 
gentlemen, when they got there, would have offered promptly recon- 
struction. Union or disunion must be the first word uttered ; there 
could be no mincing it, no postponement of it, no dodging of that ques- 
tion; if the negotiation must be for separation, -the interview of the 
Southern Commissioners with the Secretary of State of the United 
States could not last a quarter of an hour. A " To whom it may con- 
cern" would have followed, and not without reason, upon the instant. 

If, then, Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe's going to Washington 
expressly to give four years more of power to Mr. Lincoln, the pro- 
claimed enemy of peace with the South, except on such terms, I mean 
that of parting with all their property, as no people ever yet submitted 
to, be a measure of madness — if such a step be contrary to all rule and 
reason which governs the actions of men, I say it is in proof, in the best 
and clearest of proof, that when they asked a safe conduct to Washing- 
ton it was to offer reconstruction. But there is said to be counter 
proof from Richmond — I speak of the mission of Mr. Jaquess and Mr. 
Gilmoie, who, in the same month of July, 1864, by means of a military 
pass and a card from Mr. Lincoln requesting that they might be sent on 
to " the Confederacy," as the card expressed it, procured an interview 
with Mr. Davis and Mr. Benjamin, which ended in their returning to 
give an account of their mission, which you have seen published, like 
that of Mr. Clay and Mr. Ilolcombe, in all the newspapers. 

Mr. Lincoln authorized them, they said in this publication, to tell 
Mr. Davis, and they did so, that if the South would give up all their 
slaves they might return to the Union and receive a pardon. To this 
they say, Mr. Davis answered, declining, and protesting that they would 



386 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

maintain their independence. What other answer could be made to 
such a proposal ? Mr. Lincoln's terms were exactly those of the bar- 
barian, when he thought the Romans lay at his mercy. " What," 
said they, " do you mean to leave us P" 1 " Your lives /" was the 
answer. But Mr. Davis has given his own statement of what passed, 
in a very formal paper of Mr. Benjamin, his Secretary of State, dated 
the 25th August, and I look upon it as warranting all I have said of 
the mission of Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe. They had asked safe 
conduct to enter hostile territory, and initiate a negotiation " the most 
momentous" — such is their language — " ever submitted to human 
statesmanship." If there could be the least doubt of these persons, 
if what they did and offered to do was against the stomach of the 
Southern-sense, their presumption was boundless indeed, and amounted 
to an extravagance of indiscretion well deserving the severest chastise- 
ment, if indeed their government was to notice such impertinence at 
all; for you will observe that the object of Mr. Benjamin's paper was 
to dissipate the impression supposed to be made on the public mind 
by the statements published by Mr. Jaquess and Mr. Gil more, and Mr. 
Clay and Mr. Holcombe's proceedings were not in question in any 
manner or need not be. Now, what says Mr. Benjamin ? You will 
find at the conclusion of his paper, these words : 

"You have, no doubt, seen in the Northern papers an account of another con- 
ference on the subject of peace, which took place in Canada at or about the same 
date, between Messrs. C. C. Clay and J. P. Holcombe, Confederate citizens of the 
highest character and position, and Mr. Horace Greeley, of New York, acting with 
authority of President Lincoln. It is deemed not improper to inform you that 
Messrs. Clay and Holcombe, although enjoying in an eminent degree the confidence 
and esteem of the President, were strictly accurate in their statement that they 
were without any authority from this Government to treat with that of the United 
States on any subject whatever. We had no knowledge of their conference with 
Mr. Greeley, nor of their proposed visit to Washington, till we saw the newspaper 
publications." 

What does this mean? What is the meaning of saying that these 
persons, who had volunteered to take on themselves so vast a responsi- 
bility, enjoyed in " an eminent degree the confidence and esteem of the 
President?" Why should Mr. Davis, when they had no authority to 
treat, and when of their " conference with Mr. Greeley," and " their 
proposed visit to Washington" to enter upon a treaty, he knew 
nothing till he " saw the newspaper publications," go out of his way to 
use this language towards men, who, if what they did was unexpected 
or unwelcome, as well as unauthorized, were, of all blunderers, the most 
stupid and the most impertinent? Is this the language of an offended 
Government, the language of authority which has been trifled with, 



"to whom it may concern." 38*7 

which has been falsified and misrepresented by two silly interlopers ? 
Take into account that no man, either in public or private life, commits 
himself to his proposition until the opposite party is prepared to con- 
sider the case, and I do not know what you would have more closely 
resembling, in diplomatic acceptation, an out and out assent to Mr. 
Clay's and Mr. Holcombe's declaration that they were " entirely familiar" 
with " the wishes and opinions" of Mr. Davis on the subject of peace, 
and that as soon as the safe conduct was forthcoming, Mr. Davis would 
send them to Washington to negotiate " a peace mutually just, honor- 
able, and advantageous to the North and to the South." These become 
his own words, the words of Mr. Davis, which before were those of Mr. 
Clay and Mr. Holcombe only. Recollect that when Mr. Benjamin uses 
the language I have given you, he wrote with the publication made 
by Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe of their letters containing the statement 
of what they had said and done, before him. Here is Mr. Jett'erson 
Davis closer to reconstruction than Mr. Abraham Lincoln was ever 
known to be, or ever will be, so long as he is in their keeping, and 
can be comfortably lodged, fed and clothed by the Abolitionists. 
With this in no respect conflict those parts of Mr. Benjamin's paper, in 
which he refers to the late manifesto of the Southern Congress, and to 
what Colonel Ould had said, that it was useless to come to Richmond 
to talk of peace on any other terms than the recognized independence 
of the Confederacy. This " recognized independence" is a phrase easily 
construed, it means the point of honor — it means State Rights as 
understood in the South and as contended for, I may tell you — con- 
tended for wrongly, as I think; and as I suppose you think, but still 
contended for, at different periods of our history, by nearly every State 
of the Union, more particularly by the New England States, during the 
war of 1812, to judge for itself and redress its own wrongs when a 
difference arose between the Federal Government and one of its members 
— a point, no obstacle at ail to peace and Union, and which we have 
yielded each time we have sent a flag of truce to the South, or ex- 
changed prisoners with them, or treated them as belligerents, or dealt 
with them in any of the ways recognizing their independent existence, 
to which we have resorted so often since the war began. Before the 
South can return to the Union, must they swear to abandon the Resolu- 
tions of '98 ? Shall negotiations for peace with the South be barred, 
and dirty water thrown out of the window at them, because when they 
approach us they begin by asking what, whether it be too much or too 
little, has been the doctrine of every one of the shreds and patches of 
party which follow Mr. Lincoln, the old Federalists not excepted? Let 
Mr. Lincoln receive the Southern Commissioners, and we shall see what 



388 CHAELES IISTGEKSOLL. 

there is to differ about; let us know how much they ask of State rights 
more than we are willing to give. I do not ask every Republican to be 
as firmly convinced as I am that these two gentlemen who applied to 
Mr. Greeley and Mr. Hay to procure them a safe conduct to Washington, 
had they been received, and all idle 7 points of ceremony as to whether the 
Confederacy is or is not — waived as they are waived when General 
Grant addresses a letter to General Lee, styling him C. S. A., they 
would be at this day engaged in the work of reconstructing the Union, 
or have satisfied us that under Mr. Lincoln's rule it never can be recon- 
structed ; but I do ask any man of them who does not want war for the 
sake of a war contract, to believe* that those Commissioners ought to 
have been heard, ought to have been safe conducted to Washington, 
and been received to treat of peace, and I say that if they ought to have 
been received, and not turned away, the burden lies upon the friends 
and supporters of the illustrious signer of To whom it may concern to 
show that Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe, by " a peace mutually just, 
honorable, and advantageous to the North and to the South," meant a 
treaty to us unjust, dishonorable, and disadvantageous, a treaty of 
separation. It is not necessary to establish it as a fact that the 
South desire to reconstruct the Union. It is enough to show, 
to condemn Mr. Lincoln, that he has slammed the door in their 
faces when they came to say so. He must hear them, he must 
open the negotiation with them, or we will slam the* door in his 
face in November. It is idle to tell us that these people are bent 
on separation, that the Richmond and Charleston newspapers say so, 
and Southern men and women breathe nothing but defiance — they 
could not breathe at all, if they did not; for, treated with vindictive 
brutality, as they are, by this Abolition Government, whose barbarous 
course towards them is dictated by an old party grudge, which, after 
long festering, has now broken out in open hatred and revenge, they 
would not have, nor would they deserve to have, to back them in their 
contest, either politicians, soldiers, or a united country, if they said 
less, or in the least lowered their key, or moderated their tone. To the 
cry for their blood they can make no tame answer. You remember 
what Chatham said in 17T7, in his place in Parliament, during the war 
between his country and the Colonies, as they called us, after denounc- 
ing what he called " the rapine and plunder" of America, by British 
troops. " If I were an American," he went on — " If I were an 
American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed 
in my country, I never would lay down my arms — never — never — 
never." If in this unhappy quarrel, we of the North were the in- 
vaded party, and were called upon to surrender or die, who is there 



"to whom it mat conceen." 389 

among us who would be so vile as to inquire whether we were right or 
wrong when the dispute began ; who is there who would not resist to 
the last gasp, and what Northern man is there to-day who would not 
feel ashamed for his blood, if the South answered to rapine and plunder 
by throwing down their arms, and submitting ? Gentlemen, you and I 
are Northern men, not Southern men, and if, which God forbid, this 
base party, which has got us down, and now struggles to keep us under, 
should succeed, and re-electing Mr. Lincoln, proceed to divide the 
Union (as they would if they could, to give themselves rest to enjoy 
their plunder), the Abolitionists would be entitled to demand that we 
look at the inhabitants of the South with not more kindness than we 
do at those of Canada, or of Mexico ; but till then, armed to the teeth 
as they are, and fighting us, they are our brothers, and we, of the 
Democratic faith, will continue to offer to their ambassadors our out- 
stretched arms. But not so Mr. Lincoln, and he is our master, — we are 
his people, a people who used to be free, but are now only loyal. We 
take oaths of allegiance, and'Ae has an escort of dragoons. Gentlemen, 
if you want to reconstruct you must change your rulers, for Mr. Lin- 
coln knows that if, instead of insulting the Southern messengers with 
To whom it may concern, he had opened a negotiation with them — or 
at least those know who manage this ugly puppet, who pull him by the 
skirts, and twitch him by the sleeves — they know that to open a nego- 
tiation with the South, would be, if not to restore the Union, at least 
to show that the Democratic party could do it, and that would be a 
very bad card for the election day. 



"to whom it may concern." 381 

tory all the way from the Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico, but the naviga- 
tion of which no Northern man in his senses would for one moment 
think of surrendering, or, what would be as bad, leaving to treaty stipu- 
lation. It now belongs to the United States, as well as to the States 
through which it flows, and to hold it by treaty alone would be to hold 
it by no right at all but the pleasure of the other party, for a treaty 
right is a right abrogated according to the law of nations by the first 
cannon fired at us. What would they do with Chesapeake Bay, through 
which we were attacked by hostile fleets and armies both in the war of 
the Revolution and that of 1812, and which, to make safe against foreign 
aggression, even by a European power, yet more by a Southern Con- 
federacy, we of the North must hold and fortify, and which we can 
neither fortify nor hold without holding at the same time the two States 
of Maryland and Virginia? What would the negotiators of separation 
do with the State of Missouri, a Slave State, and of Southern predilec- 
tions, but lying in the midst of Northern States ? What are to be our 
borders? Which of the parties to this treaty of peace shall have those 
portions of territory now held by Northern arms in the Southern 
States of Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North 
Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana? Would Mr. Lincoln muster his 
Latin and cry iwssidetis uti ? No man can answer these questions, or 
twenty like them which might be put, and the senseless clamor of the 
followers of this Administration about Democrats who are for peace at 
all price, is fit' only to impose on those who are so ignorant as not to 
think at all, or to frighten persons who have been foolish enough to 
embark their all in Mr. Chase's loans. The doctrine of coercion, as it 
is called, of a State by force of arms, may be right or wrong, sound or 
unsound ; the Federal Convention struck it out of the draft of the Con- 
stitution as laid before them ; Hamilton said, in 1*788, in the New York 
Convention, that it was absurd and out of the question ; many men of 
the present day differ with him, but there is no such doctrine at this time 
in question before the country. Does any man suppose that if the Demo- 
cratic party should come into power they will say, on the peace question, 
"Mr. Jefferson Davis, you have so many hundred thousand men under 
arms, and so have we, but we ivill settle all this business with you on 
State's rights principles and the Resolutions of '98?" This might be if 
the millenium overtook us first. If things could go back to 1860, 
abolition in the North, secession in the South, and the question taking 
up arms, we would have the point before us. The point was before 
Mr. Lincoln himself when he delivered his inaugural address, and 
I would say he decided against it — perhaps, for through Mr. Lincoln's 
English his meauing does not always shine out as intelligibly as it does 



382 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

in To whom it may concern — you would say he dodged it. But in April, 
1861, the war broke out, and from that time to this month of Septem- 
ber, 1864, the North and South have been at open war, with armies in 
the field of immense numbers, who have fought the bloodiest battles. 
The question of dividing the Union and letting the Southern States 
secede was, before the war began, forty months ago, a practical question 
to be considered and governed according to political doctrine and wise 
policy, if (I leave to you to say how far that is probable) Northern and 
"Southern passion could have been subdued and a division of lands and 
goods made as it is between parties to a trading partnership. Such a 
dissolution would have been a peaceful dissolution, the parties taking 
this or that by the same rules which governed them when they sat to- 
gether in Congress and appropriations and distributions of public money 
were made among different parts of our territory. But here is war upon 
us, and if it is not to end in Union, if we are to separate, why we are to 
separate not like partners, but — I was going to say like a band of robbers 
who have quarrelled among themselves — at least, I may say, as the German 
States separated after the Thirty Years' War, keeping and snatching 
from one another what they could, according to the " good old rule," 

"the simple plan 

That they should take who have the power, 
And they should keep who can." 

Let any Republican explain to you how there can be peace without 
Union, how there can be separation without war. Let him do that; 
till then, gentlemen, the question is simply this — shall Mr. Lincoln 
prevail as the Union candidate, when he is doing all he can to post- 
pone Union I We want peace, for peace is happiness and liberty ; he 
wants war, for war is armies, taxes, and power. If by some miracle 
the war could stop and the country be at peace to-morrow, Mr. Lincoln 
would not get, in November, two States to vote for him. 

I come now, without further preliminary, to the consideration of 
Mr. Lincoln's letter To whom it may concern, the proof, as I regard it 
so clear and strong that no man who looks at it can doubt that, while 
the mass of the Republican party, like ourselves, are for the Union, 
for what better could they ask ? and most of them for peace and 
Union, their leaders, the controlling spirits of this Administration, 
are against any peace or any Union which, in restoring the Constitu- 
tion, will bring back the Southern States to vote the Democratic 
ticket, and banish to an exile, worse than the Dry Tortugas, the men 
who have brought us to where we are to-day. Gentlemen, on the 12th 
July, 1864, came to the Clifton House, on the Canada side of the 



"TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN." 383 

River Niagara, Mr. Clay, of Alabama, a highly respectable man, and 
when he *vas a Senator of the United States, on terms of close politi- 
cal intimacy with Mr. Jefferson Davis, and now a Senator of the 
Southern Confederacy ; and with him came Mr. Holcombe, of Virginia, 
lately, I understand, a professor in a college or university, and now 
a Representative in the Southern Congress. These gentlemen pre- 
sented themselves to Mr. Greeley, a well-known friend of Mr. Lincoln, 
and Mr. Hay, his private Secretary, representing themselves to be, 
though not yet accredited ministers, persons in whose favor creden- 
tials to negotiate for peace would be furnished the moment they were 
informed from Washington that they were under safe conduct to pro- 
ceed thither to enter upon their negotiation, and thence to Richmond, 
where necessarily they must report their proceedings. What had 
passed between them and Mr. Greeley and Mr. Hay before the 12th 
July, does not formally appear, though its character may easily be in- 
ferred from what Mr. Greeley said in his newspaper, that peace was 
not as far off as people supposed ; but from the 12th July, to the rup- 
ture of all intercourse (the 18th July) by the note To whom, it may 
concern, wc have in writing what was said and done in eight letters 
which were exchanged among the parties. You will remember that 
Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe, though not yet invested with the dignity 
of ambassadors, were acting under the full responsibility of a function 
nearly approaching to that, and what they said and did, and especially 
what they put into writing, must be regarded by us and is entitled to 
be treated with the same consideration which we would give to the 
diplomatic notes or movements of Mr. Dayton or Mr. Adams, our 
ministers in Paris and London. Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe are, as 
individuals, as respectable as they, and their mission a thousand times 
more important. The envoys were beyond suspicion, their errand 
was the blessed errand of peace. So far is plain. But peace how, 
you will ask ? Was it peace and Union ? 

The terms of peace had not been, we are to suppose, formally de- 
clared to Mr. Greeley and Mr. Hay, though from Mr. Greeley we seem 
to learn they were signified to them, for Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe, 
as yet, held no commission, but they had felt authorized to say, and 
did say in writing — I quote from their first letter to Mr. Greeley as 
much as this — that they were in the " confidential employment" of 
their Government ; that they were " entirely familiar with its wishes 
and opinions" on the subject of " propositions looking to the establish- 
ment of peace ;" that they or other persons on the safe condnct which 
they asked being furnished, would be immediately sent to Washington 
on the errand of peace, and in their note written after the To whom it 



384 CHARLES INGERSOLL. 

may concern, they declare emphatically that the peace to be proposed 
was '* a pni'< mutually jutt, honorable, and advantageous to the Xorth 
and to tin Smith." Mark the words, " mutually just, honorable, and 

advantageous." [f these two men andersl 1 their native tongue when 

they used these words, and if they were nol like ambassadors of two- 
hundred years ago, whose office sometimes was to deal in nothing but 
falsehood, their peace was peace and reconstruction. Peace to be 
mutually just, honorable, and advantageous, could not be peace by which 
the North surrendered the whole object with which the war was begun. 
Nothing could be more false than an assertion that such a peace could 
bejnsl t>> the North, or honorable to the North, or advantageous to 
the North. Be State rights and the right of secession what they may, 
such a peace, after three years of flagrant war, would be disgraceful to 
the North, and ruinous to the whole country, North and South, too. 
The langnage used by Mr. Clay and Mr. Bolcombe, could have no 
application to such a peace. It* they bo used it, they dealt in the 
meanest fraud, in direct and deliberate falsehood. That is improbable, 
but that is not all. The proof what the object of these gentlemen was, 
the proof of what they meant by what they said, the proof that Mr. Lin- 
coln is against tin- Union, the proof that he rejected overtures for peace 
ami the restoration of the Union, does not rest on the solution of the 
meaning of words, or the frailer tenure of the integrity of individuals. 
It rests on evidence of the highest kind, and which in courts of justice, 
a- well as in the whole business of life, is everywhere regarded as per- 
fect, because it is evidence which cannot deceive. If you have the oath 
of a witness to a fact, no matter who he be, you may be deceived — he 
may himself be deceived, or he may be deceiving you ; but tell me 
which way that man's interests lie, and I will tell you what the fact is. 
I will construe his words by the drift of his interests. I will presume 
that he folh.ws the rule of the human heart and does not by his words 
his interests. If these persons asked to go to Washington to 
treat for peace, that peace could notbc peace and separation, because to 
offer such terms at this juncture would be contrary to the interests of 
the South to such a degree a- to make it, incredible that so extreme an 
indiscretion was committed by persons having the control of great con- 
lb re i- the Presidential election approaching, and the North 
is divided between two parties — one for the immediate putting down 
of the South by force of arms, the emancipation of their slaves, and the 
pursuit against their whole population of measures of military rigor, 
aid, so they say, to gel the Union back; the other for pausing in our 

hostilities and calling On the South to go int nsultation with us, in 

order to an amicable adjustment of our difficulties, and so restore the 



385 

Union. Does anybody doubt that in the South they must look anxiously 
to the success, at this election, of the Democratic ticket ? I suppose 
not; I suppose no man's logic could lead him to such a conclusion as 
that the South would send Mr. Clay and Mr. Ilolcombe to Washington, 
to insist on terms of peace, which, as soon as the country came to hear 
of them, would settle in the way in which such news must settle in one 
moment the question between the contending parties in the North, for 
where would the party be whose programme is an amicable settlement, 
in order to the Uuion, when the South, through the mouth of their am- 
bassadors, had solemnly said they would make no amicable settlement, 
they never would reunite with us at all ; all that Mr. Lincoln would have 
to do would be to publish to the world the Southern offer, and there 
would be an end of the question which divides the North. If the 
way to restore the Union is not negotiation, our doctrine is false 
doctrine. To go to Washington to offer separation would have been 
too great a mistake, and there is nothing left to believe but that those 
gentlemen, when they got there, would have offered promptly recon- 
struction. Union or disunion must be the first word uttered ; there 
could be no mincing it, no postponement of it, no dodging of that ques- 
tion; if the negotiation must be for separation, the interview of the 
Southern Commissioners with the Secretary of State of the United 
States could not last a quarter of an hour. A " To whom it may con- 
cern" would have followed, and not without reason, upon the instant. 

If, then, Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe's going to Washington 
expressly to give four years more of po.wer to Mr. Lincoln, the pro- 
claimed enemy of peace with the South, except on such terms, I mean 
that of parting with all their property, as no people ever yet submitted 
to, be a measure of madness — if such a step be contrary to all rule and 
reason which governs the actions of men, I say it is in proof, in the best 
and clearest of proof, that when they asked a safe conduct to Washing- 
ton it was to offer reconstruction. But there is said to be counter 
proof from Richmond — I speak of the mission of Mr. Jaquess and Mr. 
Gilmore, who, in the same month of .July, 1864, by means of a military 
pass and a card from Mr. Lincoln requesting that they might be sent on 
to " the Confederacy," as the card expressed it, procured an interview 
with Mr. Davis and Mr. Benjamin, which ended in their returning to 
give an account of their mission, which you have seen published, like 
that of Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe, in all the newspapers. 

Mr. Lincoln authorized them, they said in this publication, to tell 

Mr. Davis, and they did so, that if the South would give up all their 

slaves they might return to the Union and receive a pardon. To this 

they say, Mr. Davis answered, declining, and protesting that they would 

•^5 



k 



386 CHARLES LNGERSOLL. 

maintain their independence. What other answer could be made to 
such a proposal I Mr. Lincoln's terms were exactly those of the bar- 
barian, when he thought the Romans lay at his mercy. " What," 
saiil they, "do you mean to leave us?" "Your lives/" was the 
answer. But Mr. Davis has given his own stateme'nt of what passed, 
in a very formal paper of Mr. Benjamin, his Secretary of State, dated 
the 25th August, and I look upon it as warranting all I have said of 
the mission of Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe. They had asked safe 
conduct to enter hostile territory, and initiate a negotiation " the most 
momentous" — such is their language — "ever submitted to human 
statesmanship." If there could be the least doubt of these persons, 
if what they did and offered to do was against the stomach of the 
Southern sense, their presumption was boundless indeed, and amounted 
to an extravagance of indiscretion well deserving the severest chastise- 
ment, if indeed their government was to notice such impertinence at 
all; for you will observe that the object of Mr. Benjamin's paper was 
to dissipate the impression supposed to be made on the public mind 
by the statements published by Mr. Jaquess and Mr. Gilmore, and Mr. 
Clay and Mr. llolcombe's proceedings were not in question in any 
manner or need not be. Now, what says Mr. Benjamin ? You will 
find at the conclusion of his paper, these words : 

"You have, no doubt, seen in the Northern papers an account of another con- 
ference on the subject of peace, which took place in Canada at or about the same 
date, between Messrs. C. C. Clay and J. P. Holcombe, Confederate citizens of the 
highest character and position, ami Mr. Horace Greeley, of New York, acting with 
authority of President Lincoln. It is deemed not improper to inform you that 
. Clay and Holcombe, although enjoying in an eminent degreo the confidence 
and esteem of the President, were strictly accurate in their statement that they 
ithout any authority from this Government to treat with that of the United 
.State- on any Btlbject whatever. We had no knowledge of their conference with 
Mr. i Ireeley, nor of their proposed visit to Washington, till we saw the newspaper 
publications." 

What does this mean? What is the meaning of saying that these 
persons, who had volunteered to take on themselves so vast a responsi- 
bility, enjoyed in "an eminent degree the confidence and esteem of the 
President f" Why should Mr. Davis, when they had no authority to 
treat, ami when of their "conference with Mr. Greeley," and "their 
proposed visit t" Washington" to enter upon a treaty, he knew 
nothing iill In- iw Baw the new-paper publications," go out of his way to 

use this language towards men, who, if what they did was unexpected 

or unwelcome, a- well as unauthorized, were, of all blunderers, the most 

stupid and the most impertinent '. Is this the language of an offended 

iment, the hrtiguage of authority which has been trifled with, 



387 

which has been falsified and misrepresented by two silly interlopers ? 
Take into account that no man, either in public or private life, commits 
himself to his proposition until the opposite party is prepared to con- 
sider the case, and I do not know what you would have more closely 
resembling, in diplomatic acceptation, an out and out assent to Mr. 
Clay's and Mr. Holcombe's declaration that they were " entirely familiar" 
with " the wishes and opinions" of Mr. Davis on the subject of peace, 
and that as soon as the safe conduct was forthcoming, Mr. Davis would 
send them to Washington to negotiate " a peace mutually just, honor- 
able, aud advantageous to the North and to the South." These become 
his own words, the words of Mr. Davis, which before were those of Mr. 
Clay and Mr. Holcombe only. Recollect that when Mr. Benjamin uses 
the language I have given you, he wrote with the publication made 
by Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe of their letters containing the statement 
of what they had said and done, before him. Here is Mr. Jefferson 
Davis closer to reconstruction than Mr. Abraham Lincoln was ever 
known to be, or ever will be, so long as he is in their keeping, and 
can be comfortably lodged, fed and clothed by the Abolitionists. 
With this in no respect conflict those parts of Mr. Benjamin's paper, in 
which he refers to the late manifesto of the Southern Congress, and to 
what Colonel Ould had said, that it was useless to come to Richmond 
to talk of peace on any other terms than the recognized independence 
of the Confederacy. This " recognized independence" is a phrase easily 
construed, it means the point of honor — it means State Rights as 
understood in the South and as contended for, I may tell you — con- 
tended for wrongly, as I think; and as I suppose you think, but still 
contended for, at different periods of our history, by nearly every State 
of the Union, more particularly by the New England States, during the 
war of 1812, to judge for itself and redress its own wrongs when a 
difference arose between the Federal Government and one of its members 
— a point, no obstacle at ail to peace and Union, and which we have 
yielded each time we have sent a flag of truce to the South, or ex- 
changed prisoners with them, or treated them as belligerents, or dealt 
with them in any of the ways recognizing their independent existence, 
to which we have resorted so often since the war began. Before the 
South can return to the Union, must they swear to abandon the Resolu- 
tions of '98 ? Shall negotiations for peace with the South be barred, 
and dirty water thrown out of the window at them, because when they 
approach us they begin by asking what, whether it be too much or too 
little, has been the doctrine of every one of the shreds and patches of 
party which follow Mr. Lincoln, the old Federalists not excepted? Let 
Mr. Lincoln receive the Southern Commissioners, and we shall see what 



k 



388 CHAELES ESTGERSOLL. 

there is to differ about; let us know how much they ask of State rights 
more than we are willing to give. I do not ask every Republican to be 
as firmly convinced as I am that these two gentlemen who applied to 
Mr. Greeley and Mr. Hay to procure them a safe conduct to Washington, 
had they been received, and all idle points of ceremony as to whether the 
Confederacy is or is not — waived as they are waived when General 
Grant addresses a letter to General Lee, styling him C. S. A., they 
would be at this day engaged in the work of reconstructing the Union, 
or have satisfied us that under Mr. Lincoln's rule it never can be recon- 
structed ; but I do ask any man of them who does not want war for the 
sake of a war contract, to believe that those Commissioners ought to 
have been heard, ought to have been safe conducted to Washington, 
and been received to treat of peace, and I say that if they ought to have 
been received, and not turned away, the burden lies upon the friends 
and supporters of the illustrious signer of To whom it may concern to 
show that Mr. Clay and Mr. Holcombe, by "a peace mutually just, 
honorable, and advantageous to the North and to the South," meant a 
treaty to us unjust, dishonorable, and disadvantageous, a treaty of 
separation. It is not necessary to establish it as a fact that the 
South desire to reconstruct the Union. It is enough to show, 
to condemn Mr. Lincoln, that he has slammed the door in their 
faces when they came to say so. He must hear them, he must 
open the negotiation with them, or we will slam the door in his 
face in November. It is idle to tell us that these people are bent 
on separation, that the Richmond and Charleston newspapers say so, 
and Southern men and women breathe nothing but defiance — they 
could not breathe at all, if they did not; for, treated with vindictive 
brutality, as they are, by this Abolition Government, whose barbarous 
course towards them is dictated by an old party grudge, which, after 
long festering, has now broken out in open hatred and revenge, they 
would not have, nor would they deserve to have, to back them in their 
contest, either politicians, soldiers, or a united country, if they said 
less, or in the least lowered their key, or moderated their tone. To the 
cry for their blood they can make no tame answer. You remember 
what Chatham said in 1777, in his place in Parliament, during the war 
between his country and the Colonies, as they called us, after denounc- 
ing what he called " the rapine and plunder" of America, by British 
troops. " It* I were an American," he went on — "If I were an 
American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed 
in my country, I never would lay down my arms — never — never — 
never." If in this unhappy quarrel, we of the North were the in- 
vaded party, and were called upon to surrender or die, who is there 




WHOM IT MAY CONCERN." 389 



among us who would be so vile as to inquire whether we were right or 
wrong when the dispute began ; who is there who would not resist to 
the last gasp, and what Northern man- is there to-day who would not 
feel ashamed for his blood, if the South answered to rapine and plunder 
by throwing down their arms, and submitting ? Gentlemen, you and I 
are Northern men, not Southern men, and if, which God forbid, this 
base party, which has got us down, and now struggles to keep us under, 
should succeed, and re-electing Mr. Lincoln, proceed to divide the 
Union (as they would if they could, to give themselves rest to enjoy 
their plunder), the Abolitionists would be entitled to demand that we 
look at the inhabitants of the South with not more kindness than we 
do at those of Canada, or of Mexico ; but till then, armed to the teeth 
as they are, and fighting us, they are our brothers, and we, of the 
Democratic faith, will continue to offer to their ambassadors our out- 
stretched arms. But not so Mr. Lincoln, and he is our master, — we are 
his people, a people who used to be free, but are now only loyal. We 
take oaths of allegiance, and he has an escort of dragoons. Gentlemen, 
if you want to reconstruct you must change your rulers, for Mr. Lin- 
coln knows that if, instead of insulting the Southern messengers with 
To whom it may concern, he had opened a negotiation with them — or 
at least those know who manage this ugly puppet, who pull him by the 
skirts, and twitch him by the sleeves — they know that to open a nego- 
tiation with the South, would be, if not to restore the Union, at least 
to show that the Democratic party could do it, and that would be a 
very bad card for the election day. 



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